COLORADO  COLLEGE 


Addresses, 


JUNE  14-17,  1891. 


I.  Baccalaureate  Sermon  by  President  Slocum. 

II.  Address  before  the  Graduating  Class  of  Cutler  Academy, 
by  the  Rev.  Richard  Montague,  D.  D. 

III.  Address  before  the  Graduating  Class  of  Colorado  College, 
by  Mr.  James  H.  Baker. 


Colorado  Springs,  Colo. 

1891. 


BACCALAUREATE  SERMON. 


By  President  Slocum. 


June  14. 


Text— Ecclesiastes  xi.  9:  “Rejoice,  O  young  man,  in  thy  youth.” 

Every  noble  man  desires  power;  power  to  achieve;  power 
over  himself;  power  over  others;  power  to  think;  power  to 
conceive  ideals,  and  power  to  realize  them  in  noble  deeds. 

The  ordinary  man  sees  things  only  as  they  appear;  the 
extraordinary  one  looks  deeper  than  appearances,  and  into 
the  hidden  meaning  and  possibilities  of  things.  To  the  one, 
steam  is  merely  expanded  water;  to  the  other,  it  is  power. 
To  the  one,  electricity  is  a  strange  curiosity  merely;  to  the 
other,  it  is  force  to  which  he  will  fasten  machinery.  The 
ordinary  man  sees  only  a  cluster  of  buildings,  a  group  of 
students,  a  company  of  teachers.  But  the  other  perceives 
an  institution  rising,  by  means  of  the  generous  gifts  of  wise 
men  and  women,  to  do  its  share  in  fashioning  the  moral  and 
intellectual  life  of  a  nation. 

One  man  lives  for .  the  means  only  by  which  noble  ends 
may  be  obtained;  another  uses  his  time,  accumulates  his 
wealth,  acquires  knowledge,  that  he  may  use  them  for  some 
high  purpose. 

The  explanation  usually  given  of  this  word  of  the  wise 
man,  which  we  have  taken  as  suggesting  our  theme,  is  that 
the  joys  of  life  belong  especially  to  our  earlier  years.  But 
aside  from  criticising  the  superficiality  of  such  an  interpre¬ 
tation,  we  question  its  truth. 

If  youth  has  its  special  joys,  it  has  also,  for  many,  its 
sorrows  and  its  disappointments;  its  thwarted  ambitions,  its 
broken  plans,  and  also  its  soul  as  yet  not  inured  to  trial. 
Peculiar  pleasures  it  has,  but  so  has  middle  life — joys  which 
are  richer  and  deeper.  Old  age,  too,  for  noble  men  and 


( 


4 


women,  has  its  deep,  calm  delights  that  are  its  own  peculiar 
possession.  What,  then,  is  the  meaning  of  this  expression: 
“Rejoice,  O  young  man,  in  thy  youth”? 

Did  you  ever  stand  beside  a  noble  youth,  with  vigor  of 
intellect,  with  the  eagerness  of  moral  enthusiasm,  who,  brave 
and^ magnanimous,  carried  others  to  his  high  ideals  by  the 
very  force  of  his  noble  character?  Did  you  feel  a  peculiar 
joy  in  his  strength  and  the  possible  achievements  that  lay  in 
his  pathway? 

Do  you  catch  my  meaning?  Youth  has  special  oppor¬ 
tunities,  peculiar  enthusiasms,  rare  privileges.  Youth, 
when  not  wasted,  perverted  or  misused,  is  beautiful  and 
rich.  The  wise  man  says:  Rejoice  in  it  because  of  its 
possibilities  of  moral  strength,  because  of  its  opportunities, 
because  of  its  special  privileges.  Let  us  see  what  some  of 
the  things  are  that  belong  to  youth,  in  which  a  young  person 
is  to  rejoice.  Rejoice  in  thy  youth,  because  of  its  enthusi¬ 
asms.  The  enthusiasms  of  a  noble  youth  are  beautiful. 
Truth  comes  with  freshness  to  him.  Traditions  do  not  bind 
his  heart;  unbelief  has  not  frozen  his  soul.  Opportunity  is 
real. 

Do  you  remember  that  hour  when  life  seemed  something 
larger  than  it  had  before;  when  your  heart  burned  within 
you  as  you  listened  to  the  voice  that  came  and  unfolded  the 
deeper  meaning  of  the  old  truth;  when  God  seemed  to  speak 
to  you,  and  a  deep,  serious,  noble  side  to  life  began  to  open 
before  you?  The  fire  was  burning  within  your  soul;  you 
thought:  I,  too,  will  make  my  life  worthy;  I  will  fill  it  with 
noble  deeds.  You  were  full  of  faith,  hope  and  courage;  this 
was  enthusiasm;  God  was  in  you.  Nothing  is  sadder  than 
to  lose  the  inspirations  of  these  enthusiasms;  to  call  them 
merely  empty  dreams;  as  the  years  come  and  go,  to  let  them 
lose  their  hold  on  us,  and  only  the  coldness  of  an  empty,  self¬ 
ish,  perhaps  a  vice-conquered  life,  be  ours.  O  young  man, 
rejoice  in  the  moral  and  the  intellectual  enthusiasms  that 
come  in  these  younger  days. 

Rejoice,  too,  in  the  way  in  which  duty  often  reveals  itself  to 
you.  We,  who  have  come  through  deep  and  varied  experiences 


to  know  that  the  obligations  of  duty  have  become  a  part  of 
our  moral  fibre,  do  not  envy  you  the  inevitable  and  painful 
experiences  through  which  most  of  you  must  pass  before  you 
come  to  a  like  condition.  But  we  know  that  no  one  can  come 
to  this  knowledge  for  you.  And  therefore  we  remember 
with  joy  the  freshness  that  youth  alone  knows;  its  happy 
enthusiasms  for  right,  which,  kept  clear  and  strong  and  con¬ 
secrated,  will  bring  you  into  all  truth.  And  God  grant  that 
they  may  lead  you  to  a  manhood  better  than  any  of  us  have 
shown  you. 

Life  is  empty,  poor,  mean,  worthless,  unless  duty  com¬ 
mands  us,  and  rouses  our  better  self  and  opens  up  God’s 
ways  to  us.  Is  there  anything  more  painful  than  to  find 
young  men  or  young  women  who  have  no  moral  or  religious 
enthusiasm;  who  have  no  idea  that  God  calls  them  through 
their  duties  to  the  highest  life?  Rejoice  in  youth,  because  it 
is  the  time  in  which  the  habits  of  life  are  formed. 

To  fix  one’s  character  on  the  side  of  right,  to  establish  it 
against  all  that  is  wrong,  is  the  true  destiny  of  human  souls. 
But  every  habit  has  behind  it  thought.  He  who  is  in  the 
habit  of  doing  noble  deeds,  is  also  in  the  habit  of  thinking 
high  thoughts.  Purity  of  thought,  honest  ideas,  straight¬ 
forward  consideration  of  questions  of  personal  responsibility, 
make  the  man  of  pure  deeds,  of  veracity  and  dutifulness. 

We  must  not  delay  over  these  suggestions,  important  as 
they  are,  because  I  want  to  speak  of  special  spheres  of  action, 
in  which  it  should  be  a  matter  of  great  rejoicing  to  every 
young  man  that  he  can  enter  for  noble  achievements  with 
enthusiasm,  with  dutifulness,  and  with  the  power  of  strong 
habit. 

But  no  discussion  of  the  fields  of  action  is  worth  much 
unless  first  of  all  and  before  all  else  there  is  the  personal 
consecration  of  each  soul  to  God  and  His  truth.  We  talk 
and  theorize,  we  dream  our  utopian  dreams,  or  we  may  con¬ 
demn  and  become  pessimistic,  but  the  world  is  ready  to  be 
saved  only  as  the  individual  gives  himself  in  willing  self¬ 
surrender  to  God,  and  does  His  will  in  all  things.  Is  it  our 
will,  our  theory,  our  opinion,  or  the  eternal  will  and  the  eternal 


6 


0 

purpose  tliat  we  seek?  All  else  comes  back  to  this.  As  stu¬ 
dents  of  Christ,  as  pupils  of  the  divine  Master,  and  as  His 
disciples  too,  we  must  go  on  our  way.  Let  this  thought 
never  lose  its  hold  upon  you;  and  whatever  your  field  of 
work,  your  life  will  be  full  of  usefulness  and  the  joy  and 
peace  of  God. 

And  now  I  wish  to  speak  of  three  special  opportunities 
in  which  you  are  to  rejoice.  The  first  is  the  Christian 
church.  We  have  no  time  to  study  this  great  historic 
institution  that  has  had  such  an  important  place  in  the 
world’s  history.  It  has  come  down  to  us  as  a  great  power 
out  of  the  past,  and  has  come  for  a  great  purpose.  The 
church  represents  three  great  ideas — worship  of  God,  the 
absolute  standard  of  morality,  and  altruism,  or  service  for 
others.  You  will  come  to  feel,  as  every  earnest  man  and 
woman  does,  that  the  church  is  far  from  doing  its  full  work. 
While  its  past  history  has  much  which  we  admire,  because  of 
wdiat  good  and  great  men  have  achieved  for  it,  it  has  also 
much  that  rouses  opposite  feelings,  because  the  human  ele¬ 
ment  in  its  organization  has  carried  also  the  weakness  of 
humanity  into  it. 

It  will  ever  be  the  battlefield  of  thought  and  intense  dis¬ 
cussion.  This  is  not  wholly  to  be  regretted.  The  great  dis¬ 
cussions  of  these  latter  days  between  the  so-called  liberal  and 
conservative  parties  in  the  church  have  some  marks  of 
promise  in  them.  They  indicate  life  and  interest  in  the 
greatest  of  human  problems. 

The  great  caldron  seethes  and  boils,  and  out  of  all  the 
fire  and  smoke  will  come  great  truths  more  clearly  appre¬ 
hended  and  defined. 

Let  none  of  you  be  either  frightened  into  pessimism  or 
into  a  too  confident  optimism.  The  worst  is  not  near  at 
hand,  nor  has  the  best  arrived.  But  the  Christian  church  is 
rising  to  its  work  and  its  larger  destiny.  Neither  the  nar¬ 
rowness  and  the  illiberality  of  a  falsely  called  liberalism,  nor 
the  narrowness  and  illiberality  of  a  falsely  called  orthodoxy, 
are  the  hope  of  the  church.  The  church  needs,  as  never 
before,  brave,  large-hearted  and  calm-souled  men  and 


7 


women,  too  magnanimous  to  persecute,  and  too  wise  to  be 
misled  by  shallow  thinking.  The  church  is  not  to  be  thrown 
over  because  of  its  mistakes,  nor  is  the  opinion  of  any  set  of 
men  within  it  to  be  followed  as  infallible;  but  that  the 
Christian  church  offers  an  opportunity  to  the  earnest,  wise 
young  man,  that  should  stir  every  enthusiasm  and  possibility 
within  him,  there  can  be  no  doubt. 

It  needs  wise,  patient  thinkers;  men  and  women  who  are 
both  fearless  and  deeply  reverent;  so  large-minded  and  large- 
hearted  that  they  can  receive  from  the  past  its  splendid 
heritage  of  truth  and  consecration,  and  reject  its  weakness, 
its  false  traditions,  and  its  narrow  dogmatism. 

The  young  person  who  is  thoughtful,  earnest  and  full  of 
the  eagerness  of  fresh  ideas  and  the  first  insight  into  the 
deeper  meaning  of  lives,  confronting  the  narrow  side  of  the 
church,  may  be  tempted  to  throw  aside  all  allegiance  to  it,  to 
think  that  the  church  has  no  place  for  him.  But  this  is  a 
mistake.  The  Christian  church,  in  spite  of  its  wretched  sec¬ 
tarianism,  in  spite  of  that  foolish  spirit  of  persecution  that 
still  survives  as  a  legacy  from  medievalism,  in  spite  of  all  its 
limitations  that  come  because  it  is  an  organization  of  human 
beings,  with  all  the  weaknesses  of  humanity,  has  a  great  and 
far-reaching  destiny.  Are  you  sufficiently  wise,  devoted,  far¬ 
sighted,  patient,  and  consecrated  to  put  yourself,  heart  and 
soul,  into  sympathy  with  its  best  possibilities  and  do  your 
share  towards  making  it  so  free  that  no  narrow  spirit  of  per¬ 
secution  can  abide  within  it;  such  a  conserving  force  that 
everything  that  is  true  shall  be  more  clearly  seen,  because  of 
it;  so  useful  that  through  its  spirit  of  service  there  shall  be 
no  part  of  the  world  where  the  spirit  and  the  truth  of  the 
Christ  shall  not  be  carried,  and  no  human  need  to  which 
the  church  shall  not  minister? 

There  is  another  sphere  for  the  young  person  who  wishes 
to  form  habits  of  high  thought  and  noble  endeavor.  That 
is  society.  I  use  this  word,  however,  in  its  larger  sense, 
and  not  with  the  narrow  meaning  usually  given  to  it.  Society 
is  the  congregation  of  people  together  for  some  common  pur¬ 
pose.  This  may  be  in  the  slums  as  well  as  in  the  lecture  hall 


8 


or  the  church.  There  is  society  in  the  prison,  in  the  poor- 
house,  in  the  jail.  There  is  society  in  the  business  office  and  in 
the  crowded  factory.  There  is  society  in  the  tenement  house 
and  in  the  work  room  of  the  poor  sewing  girl.  There  is  so¬ 
ciety  in  the  hall  of  the  labor  organization  and  the  rooms  of 
the  directors  of  great  corporations;  society  of  the  rich  and 
society  of  the  poor;  society  of  the  pure  and  of  the  impure,  of 
thieves  and  of  honest  men;  society  of  earnest  people  and  of 
those  that  are  flippant;  society  of  all  kinds,  actuated  by  all 
kinds  of  ideas  and  controlled  by  all  kinds  of  standards. 
This  society  is  guided  and  saved  by  noble  men  and  women 
with  noble  ideas;  it  is  debauched  by  ignoble  persons  with 
ignoble  ideas. 

These  are  days  in  which  the  problems  of  society  are 
being  very  earnestly  studied  by  large-minded  men  and 
women.  You  have  had  your  thoughts  turned  during  the 
past  year  to  the  great  questions  that  confront  the  student  of 
social  science  in  modern  times.  You  have  considered  the 
work  that  is  being  done  for  the  wretched,  the  ignorant,  the 
neglected  classes  of  society ;  and  the  pauper  and  the  criminal 
have  asked  your  thought.  You  have  some  knowledge  of 
their  inferior  standards,  and  you  have  felt  the  possibilities 
of  society  controlled  by  high  thinking  and  noble  living. 

You  know  of  the  men  and  women  who,  in  New  York,  in 
East  London,  in  Chicago,  and  in  other  cities,  are  going  down 
to  the  poor  and  the  outcast;  wffio  are  seeking  to  transform 
the  homes  of  the  vicious,  to  save  the  children,  to  break  down 
the  wretched  features  of  the  tenement-house  system,  to  drive 
out  the  saloon  and  the  gambling  hell.  But  all  this  work  has 
only  just  commenced.  There  are  large  fields  of  usefulness, 
of  profound  and  careful  study,  for  any  one  who  is  willing  to 
give  his  time  and  his  strength  to  the  study  of  the  problems 
of  social  science;  and  there  never  was  a  time  when  so  much 
could  be  done  in  so  short  a  time  as  in  these  last  few  years. 
Books,  monographs,  pamphlets  innumerable,  are  being  pub¬ 
lished.  The  inductive  method  of  studying  these  problems  is 
leading  to  most  careful  investigations,  and  the  young  person 
who  wishes  to  know  the  problems  of  modern  society,  and  to 


9 


give  liis  life  to  their  solution,  has  every  reason  to  enter  with 
enthusiasm  and  a  feeling  of  profoundest  interest  into  a  life 
devoted  to  these  lines  of  thought  and  action.  Careful  consid¬ 
eration  must  be  given  to  the  questions  that  are  open  between 
the  rich  and  the  poor,  the  employer  and  the  employe.  All  of 
us  have  some  relation  to  these  problems  of  social  life.  What 
will  you  do  with  them?  It  may  be  you  will  not  become 
special  students  of  social  science  in  any  technical  sense,  but 
you  can  either  feel  that  these  questions  are  vital  to  society; 
that  you  are  a  part  of  this  society,  and  therefore  they  should 
be  yours;  that  Christianity  has  the  solution  of  them  all;  that 
the  application  of  the  Christian  ideal  to  society  has  in  it  the 
cure  of  all  social  ills;  or  you  can  turn  away  from  these  prob¬ 
lems  and  with  a  selfish  soul  live  unto  yourself.  But  you  may 
well  rejoice  in  your  youth  and  all  that  lies  before  you,  if  you 
wish  to  discover  your  work  and  your  lot  in  this  matter.  “It 
seems  to  me,”  says  a  keen  and  discerning  writer  of  modern 
times,  “that  we  are  living  in  a  crisis  of  the  world?s  history;  a 
great  crisis,  for  it  is  a  moral  crisis.”  Whether  justice  is  merely 
“the  interest  of  the  stronger”  is  the  question  being  forced  upon 
us,  and  fairly  and  truthfully  we  must  answer  it.  Is  it  true 
that  “there  is  abroad  a  gospel  of  selfishness,  soothing  as  soft 
flutes  to  those  who,  having  fared  well  themselves,  think  that 
everybody  ought  to  be  satisfied?” 

God  grant  that  a  Victor  Hugo  may  never  have  to  say  of 
America,  “The  paradise  of  the  rich  is  made  out  of  the  hell  of 
the  poor.”  Is  it  true  that  our  national  conception  of  justice 
is  simply  that  of  Napoleon,  when  he  said:  “With  the  armies 
of  France  at  my  back,  I  shall  be  always  in  the  right?”  Re¬ 
member,  as  Dr.  Arnold  said,  “to  worship  force  is  devil 
worship;”  and  whether  this  is  found  in  the  organization  of 
labor,  or  in  the  organization  of  wealth,  it  is  all  the  same.  Can 
you,  will  you,  wherever  you  are,  stand  first  for  right,  for 
justice,  for  honesty?  I  would  we  might  all  find  our  ethical 
principle  in  those  words  of  Cardinal. Newman:  “Better  were 
it  for  sun  and  moon  to  drop  from  heaven,  for  the  earth  to 
fail,  and  for  all  the  weary  millions  who  are  upon  it  to  die  of 
starvation  in  extremest  agony,  so  far  as  temporal  affliction 


10 


goes,  than  that  one  soul  should  tell  one  willful  untruth, 
though  it  harmed  no  one,  or  steal  one  poor  farthing  without 
excuse.” 

There  is  one  other  sphere  of  action  in  which  there  is 
noble  work  awaiting  our  American  youth.  I  mean  the  sphere 
of  politics.  No  one  will  imply  that  the  holding  of  public 
office  is  the  only  way  to  do  good  work  in  the  field  of  politics; 
although  I  could  wish  that  it  were  the  custom  here,  as  in 
England,  for  many  of  our  young  men  to  be  specially  trained 
for  public  life.  But  no  one  can  have  studied  our  American 
system  of  government  without  realizing  two  or  three  impor¬ 
tant  facts.  First,  the  important  position  of  the  individual 
citizen.  He  holds  the  sovereign  power;  he  it  is  that  makes 
public  opinion;  he  it  is  that  holds  the  destiny  of  the  Repub¬ 
lic  in  his  grasp.  Another  fact  is  that  the  importance  of  the 
individual  offers  great  temptation  to  lust  for  power,  and 
great  temptation  to  corruption.  This  latter  is  especially 
great  in  a  government  like  ours,  where  combinations  of  indi¬ 
vidual  citizens  are  able  to  grasp  so  much  power,  and  either 
by  fair  or  foul  means  to  lay  hold  of  the  government.  Another 
fact  is,  that  the  extreme  partisanship  manifested  in  our 
American  politics  needs,  as  its  safeguard,  a  tremendously 
strong  hold  upon  ethical  principles.  While  parties  must 
necessarily  be  a  potent  element  in  our  government,  yet  there 
is  temptation  to  lose  sight  of  the  higher  conceptions  of  right 
for  the  lower  ideas  held  by  one’s  party.  To  my  mind,  this  is 
the  most  dangerous  element  in  our  present  political  system, 
and  its  fruits  are  seen  in  the  dishonesty  of  many  political 
clubs  or  organizations,  and  the  tendency  among  the  mass  of 
petty  politicians,  in  our  American  cities,  to  lose  sight  of  all 
moral  ideas  in  their  desire  for  so-called  party  success.  If  the 
ward  politician  is  to  control  our  cities,  and  the  cities  the 
country,  then  our  republic,  in  spite  of  all  its  resources,  is 
being  built  upon  the  sand,  and  some  day  the  storm  will 
surely  come. 

The  young  men  are  coming  to  the  front.  A  generation 
of  public  leaders  is  fast  passing  away.  What  is  before  us? 
On  the  one  hand,  an  opportunity  for  noble  achievement 


11 


never  before  offered  to  any  people;  on  the  other,  the  saddest 
failure  in  popular  government  the  world  has  ever  seen.  I 
have  lately  been  reading  a  book  which  discusses  the  question 
—  strange  that  it  should  need  to  be  discussed — “Is  there  a 
right  and  wrong  in  politics?” 

One  writer  says:  “Men  are  to  be  guided  only  by  their 
self-interests.  Good  government  is  a  good  balancing  of  these, 
and,  except  a  keen  eye  and  appetite  for  self-interest,  requires 
no  virtue  in  any  quarter.” 

Is  politics  simj)ly  a  game  to  be  played,  first  for  one’s  self, 
and  then  for  one’s  party? 

I  would  like  to  ask  the  question  of  our  serious-minded 
politicians  —  and  there  are  many  of  them  —  are  we  not  often 
losing  sight  of  the  absolute,  eternal  law  of  right  in  the  dom¬ 
ination  of  the  brute  force  of  numbers?  Is  it  safe  to  accept 
the  opinions  of  the  masses  as  the  supreme  law? 

The  world’s  great  saviors  have  not  been  with  the  majori¬ 
ties.  Was  Goethe  all  wrong  when  he  said:  “Nothing  is  more 
abhorrent  to  a  reasonable  man  than  an  appeal  to  a  majority,  for 
it  consists  of  a  few  strong  men  who  lead,  of  knaves  who  tem¬ 
porize,  of  the  feeble  wdio  are  hangers-on,  and  of  the  multitude 
who  follow  without  the  slightest  idea  of  what  they  want.” 
Our  political  life  needs  young  men  who  love,  first  of  all,  the 
eternal  law  of  right;  whose  ethical  principle  is,  “because 
right  is  right,  to  follow  right  were  wisdom,  in  the  scorn  of 
consequence.” 

The  law  of  morality  is  absolute  wherever  it  is  found,  and 
for  the  man  who  is  brave  and  true  enough  to  live  this  out 
there  is  most  important  work.  I  verily  believe  we  are  at  a 
great  moral  crisis  in  our  political  system ;  and  that  crisis  can 
be  safely  passed  only  as  the  young  men  of  the  country  are 
ready  to  cease  temporizing  with  the  eternal  principles  of  jus¬ 
tice  and  virtue  and  ever  be  ready  to  stand,  as  Jesus  and  Soc¬ 
rates,  as  Paul  and  Savonarola  have  stood,  alone,  if  necessary, 
for  the  right. 

“I  write  unto  you,  young  men,  because  you  are  strong,” 
said  the  beloved  disciple,  and  how  forcibly  those  words  come 
to  us  to-day  in  this  country  of  ours.  What  cannot  the  strength 


12 


of  tlie  youth  of  this  generation  do,  if  they  will?  Rejoice  in 
your  youth  —  in  its  magnificent  opportunity,  in  its  wondrous 
privilege. 

Here,  then,  are  three  great  fields  of  action:  the  church, 
society,  politics;  and  you  have  every  reason  for  entering 
upon  them  with  enthusiasm,  with  dutifulness,  and  wfith 
the  habits  of  a  noble  life.  Where  your  lines  will  be  placed 
we  do  not  know.  God  has  His  work  for  you,  and  wherever 
you  turn  your  faces  in  these  coming  years  there  will  be  these 
opportunities.  What  will  you  do  with  them?  Remember  that 
every  base  thought,  every  ignoble  deed,  mars  the  usefulness  of 
your  life.  Keep  yourselves  unspotted  from  the  world,  and 
remember  always  the  words  of  the  Great  Teacher:  “  I  pray  not 
that  thou  shouldst  take  them  out  of  the  world,  but  that  thou 
shouldst  keep  them  from  the  evil.”  In  the  world  you  are, 
and  God’s  work  awaits  you.  Will  you  do  it?  Hold,  then,  to 
those  eternal  laws  of  right;  never  temporize  with  them.  Lose 
position,  as  the  world  calls  it,  if  necessary;  stand  alone,  if  you 
must,  but  be  true  to  the  eternal,  never-changing  ideas  of 
righteousness. 


ADDRESS 

TO  THE  GRADUATING  CLASS  OF  CUTLER  ACADEMY. 


By  the  Rey.  Richard  Montague,  D.  D. 


June  16. 


Perhaps  the  remarks  which  I  wish  to  make  in  response 
to  your  kind  invitation  can  be  summed  up  in  one  word — 
Focus.  When  we  wish  to  use  a  microscope,  opera  glass, 
telescope  or  camera,  we  must  adjust  the  instrument  with  care 
till  a  clear,  accurate  image  is  printed  on  the  retina  or  sensi¬ 
tive  plate.  Focus  is  essential  for  just  vision. 

There  is  much  discussion  as  to  the  object  of  education. 
The  dull  practicalist  makes  all  this  discipline  through  which 
the  student  passes  a  mere  training  for  bread-winning.  He 
measures  its  value  by  houses,  raiment,  food.  The  high 
culturist,  on  the  other  hand,  views  only  the  human  faculties, 
and  in  their  development  finds  end  enough  for  the  educa¬ 
tional  cult.  Is  there  not  a  mediating  view  which  is  nearer 
the  truth?  We  are  in  the  world,  yet  we  should  be  greater 
than  it.  We  need  it;  but  we  should  spurn  slavery  to  it. 

I  take  it  that  the  real  object  of  education  is,  to  see  the 
world  as  it  is.  It  is  a  wondrous  universe  by  which  we  are 
surrounded.  This  cosmos  of  material  things  is  full  of  a  glory 
by  few  perceived;  and  there  is  a  sublimer  order  within  to 
which  more  yet  are  blind.  To  see  all  this,  not  as  confusion, 
but  as  order;  not  as  chaos,  but  as  cosmos;  to  discern  its  parts 
in  their  just  relations;  to  discriminate  as  to  their  values  and 
uses — is,  to  my  mind,  the  end  of  what  we  call  education. 

The  world  loves  men  of  “common  sense.”  But  if  such 
sense  be  not  uncommon,  why  is  it  so  loudly  praised?  What 
is  “common  sense?”  It  is  the  power,  so  rare  and  thus  so 
precious,  of  seeing  things  as  they  are.  Genius  is  but  com¬ 
mon  sense  raised  to  the  nth  power.  The  genius  is  the  man 


14 


of  insight.  He  sees  farther,  deeper  than  other  men,  but  he 
sees  reality,  not  fancy;  he  is  the  man  of  extraordinarily  pene¬ 
trating  and  clear  vision. 

Experiments  show  that  a  large  proportion  of  men  are  color 
blind.  Surely,  untrained  minds  have  very  confusing  and  con¬ 
fused  mental  images.  Bad  cooking  is  due  to  want  of  do¬ 
mestic  perspective.  You  will  not  have  un ventilated  houses, 
neglected  sewerage,  want  of  quarantine,  ragged  children, 
vicious  morals,  business  failures,  speculative  “  booms,”  wild-cat 
finance — mere  castles  in  the  air — where  there  is  mental  focus. 
I  would  rather  look  at  any  scene  with  my  naked  eye  than  with 
a  glass.  Experiment  as  I  will,  the  lenses  bring  it  to  me 
blurred,  chromatic.  Education,  personal  or  inherited,  has 
taught  me  to  focus  the  natural  organ,  but  not  the  invented 
instrument.  Be  it  so.  The  point  is  to  see.  What  teaches  you 
to  see,  that  is  education.  What  gives  you  vision,  that  is 
training  to  be  sought.  To  get  the  right  adjustment  of  faculty, 
to  win  poise,  to  become  seers  —  focus;  this  is  requisite  for  the 
wislied-for  harmony  with  our  surroundings.  We  see  in  na¬ 
ture,  literature  or  life  what  we  bring  to  it.  An  untutored, 
prosaic  mind,  studying  the  “Angelus,”  suggested  to  his  com¬ 
panions  that  these  people  had  stopped  digging  potatoes,  wait¬ 
ing  for  the  twelve  o’clock  whistle,  so  as  to  go  home  for  dinner. 
You  can  see  his  mind  had  never  been  drawn  out,  developed, 
focused  on  the  poetry,  religion  of  life,  and  the  image  of  the 
artist  was  another  than  his  own.  I  was  in  the  Catskills;  sit¬ 
ting  on  a  choice  point  of  observation,  my  soul  was  thrilled  by 
the  glorious  vision.  I  followed  a  silvery  thread  for  miles  to 
the  west,  till  it  ended  in  a  dashing  cascade,  pouring  over  the 
precipitous  rocks  and  ledges  that  terminated  there  the  valley’s 
stretch.  I  followed  that  crystal  stream  eastward,  by  gentle 
declivity  falling,  till  it  emptied  its  waters  into  the  lordly 
Hudson,  with  measured  pace  striding  Atlanticward,  his  beau¬ 
teous  sheen  flanked  by  the  distant  hills  of  Berkshire  and 
Litchfield.  Across  the  valley,  precisely  opposite,  rose  a  noble 
mountain,  the  fragrance  of  whose  verdure,  the  comeliness  of 
whose  form,  intoxicated  my  senses.  I  thought  it  all.  Surely 
it  seemed  enough,  and  I  was  about  to  go;  but  my  friend  said: 


15 


“Wait  a  moment;  listen.”  And  letting  the  attentive  ear  join 
hand  with  the  enchanted  eye,  I  heard  a  burst  of  song  from 
that  verdure-clad  mountain,  that  stream-bejeweled  valley, 
that  grove  of  observation  —  the  notes  of  countless  feathered 
songsters — that  made  me  realize,  in  feeble  measure,  how  vo¬ 
cal  with  His  praises  are  all  the  Creator's  works,  and  suspect 
that  Pythagoras  was  right  after  all,  and  sometime,  somehow, 
our  ears  shall  be  opened  to  “the  music  of  the  spheres.” 

The  best  of  us  have  but  partial  vision.  Only  a  part  of 
our  nature  is  responsive  to  the  world  of  beauty,  thought,  life. 
We  need  more  breadth.  We  are  narrow,  lacking  scope.  We 
are  not  adjusted  to  all  our  surroundings.  We  want  focus. 
We  draw  out  the  telescope’s  barrels  till  lens  is  adjusted  to 
lens,  and  as  a  Roger  Bacon,  or  Baptista  Porta,  or  Galileo,  or 
Newton,  we  see.  What  is  education  but  educing,  drawing 
out  the  powers  of  man  till  perception,  judgment,  reason,  con¬ 
science,  faith,  are  adjusted,  and  as  Plato,  Pascal,  Emerson, 
Jesus,  we  see  God’s  world  as  it  is?  The  narrow,  partial, 
obscure,  the  petty,  ignoble,  murky,  it  is  education’s  office  to 
remove.  He  who  has  the  art  of  focus  has  subjective  impres¬ 
sions  that  are  congruous  with  objective  realities. 

There  are  two  coupjets  of  requirement  for  such  focal  ad¬ 
justment  that  you  will  permit  me  to  point  out.  Their  mem¬ 
bers  may  seem  contradictory  each  to  its  companion,  but  they 
are  really  complementary,  the  one  defective  without  its  ap¬ 
parent  opposite.  For  mental  focus  there  is  needed: 

I.  Intensity.  Very  few  people  have  an  educated  eye. 
Did  you  ever  pass  a  shop  window  and  then  seek  to  recall  the 
objects  you  had  seen  in  it?  Try  it  every  day  for  a  week. 
Learn  from  the  many  things  you  will  see  on  Saturday  how 
few  things  you  saw  on  Monday.  Go  out  into  a  field  and  listen 
to  the  insect’s  hum,  the  bird’s  song,  the  farmer’s  cheery  voice, 
the  breeze’s  stir.  Were  you  ever  aware  before  that  nature 
was  so  vocal?  You  say  the  ocean  is  monotonous?  Did  you 
ever  study  it?  The  hurried  tourist  stops  two  days  at  Manitou, 
is  driven  over  the  conventional  routes.  Does  he  know  our 
mountains?  How  much  can  a  man  see  in  six  weeks  abroad — 
London,  Oxford,  Cambridge,  the  Scotch  Lakes,  Paris,  done 


16 


in  thirty  clays  on  a  Cooke  ticket?  No  man  can  see  the  glories 
of  this  world  who  does  not  open  his  eyes  and  look.  I  always 
thought  an  earth-worm  unworthy  more  than  a  passing  glance, 
and  wondered  that  so  great  a  man  as  Charles  Darwin  could 
pause  to  write  a  book  on  so  ignoble  a  theme.  But  when  I 
learned  the  result  of  the  great  naturalist’s  studies,  I  had  a 
different  estimate  of  the  earth-worm’s  place  in  the  economy 
of  nature.  A  common  bug  or  beetle  you  think  a  blunder  of 
creation?  Put  it  under  a  microscope  and  see.  Many  men  fail 
for  mere  mental  myopy.  Want  of  concentration  is  the  mark 
of  an  untrained  mind.  John  Todd  was  a  nervous,  dyspeptic, 
consumptive  preacher,  but  as  student,  author,  and  divine,  he 
did  his  best  work,  undisturbed  by  slamming  doors,  shouting 
children,  or  chattering  women.  Luther  sometimes  became 
so  absorbed  in  study  as  to  pass  by  one,  two,  three  meals.  It 
was  hard  for  his  loved  Katharine,  but  you  and  I,  though 
unwittingly,  have  profited  by  it.  There  is  this  advantage, 
first  of  all,  in  the  telescope:  It  narrows  the  range  of  vision; 
it  fixes  the  eye  on  one  point,  one  star,  in  the  heavens.  By  it 
you  can  study  one  spot  on  the  sun,  or  one  mountain  of  the 
moon.  We  are  surprised  at  the  swiftness  and  accuracy  of 
some  men’s  judgments.  A  Gould,  a  Rockefeller,  a  Vander¬ 
bilt  makes  decisions  involving  millions  of  dollars  in  a 
moment,  because  he  has  brought  the  intensity  of  his  whole 
energy  to  consider  the  problem.  The  captain  of  the  victorious 
American  team  at  Creedmoor  said  that  his  men  won  as  soon 
as  each  man’s  entire  attention  was  given  to  the  captain’s 
order.  The  absent-minded  man  is  the  butt  of  many  an  ill- 
advised  laugh  or  joke,  but  they  who  are  better  taught  know 
that  absent-mindedness  is  often  truest  present-mindedness. 
It  is  undivided  attention  to  the  thing  in  hand.  He  who  is 
without  it  is  not  an  educated  man.  He  lacks  the  first  ad¬ 
justment  to  life. 

II.  Yet,  on  the  other  hand,  for  mental  focus  a  seemingly 
opposite  adjustment  is  equally  necessary.  I  mean  Passivity. 

Our  greatest  essayist  has  a  beautiful  passage  in  which  he 
urges  the  student  of  nature  to  leave  his  military  hurry  and 


17 


adopt  the  quiet  pace  of  his  mistress.  Her  secret  is  patience. 
When  the  naturalist  goes  into  the  woods,  the  birds  fly  before 
him,  and  he  finds  nqne;  when  he  goes  to  the  river  bank,  the 
fish  and  the  reptile  swim  away  and  leave  him  alone.  How 
does  he  learn  all  the  secrets  of  the  forest,  of  plants,  of  birds, 
of  beasts,  of  reptiles,  of  fishes,  of  the  rivers  and  the  sea? 
Why,  he  sits  down,  and  sits  still;  he  is  a  statue;  he  is  a  log. 
These  creatures  have  no  value  for  their  time,  and  he  must 
put  as  low  a  rate  on  his.  By  dint  of  obstinate  sitting  still, 
reptile,  fish,  bird  and  beast,  which  all  wish  to  return  to  their 
haunts,  begin  to  return.  If  they  approach  him,  he  is  passive; 
he  sits  still.  They  lose  their  fear,  they  become  even  curious 
about  him .  They  come  swimming,  creeping  and  flying  towards 
him.  They  make  advance  toward  a  biped  who  behaves  so 
civilly  and  well.  Thus  he  knows  them. 

Intensity  is  not  noise.  Concentration  is  not  bustle.  Haste 
is  not  hurry.  Speed  is  not  drive.  You  cannot,  you  simply 
cannot  see  or  hear  what  creation  has  to  reveal,  if  you  do  not 
keep  still.  “Touch  the  button  and  we  do  the  rest,”  is  a  good 
enough  motto  for  the  amateur  with  his  kodak.  It  is  not  a 
motto  for  him  who  wishes  clear,  accurate,  broad,  comprehen¬ 
sive,  satisfying  visions  of  the  universe  of  God.  Nature  will 
not  be  hurried.  It  is  unwise  to  attempt  to  master  four  years’ 
courses  of  study  in  thirtj^-six  months,  even  though  the  presi¬ 
dent  of  Harvard  university  advises  his  overseers  to  give  an 
A.  B.  to  every  man  who  will  do  it.  Minds,  like  hats,  that  are 
stretched  unnaturally,  have  a  painful  way  of  shrinking  back 
again.  It  takes  time,  as  well  as  teachers,  laboratories,  maps, 
books,  colleges,  to  make  a  man.  Americans  lose  by  rushing 
so  fast.  It’s  boyish  to  dig  up  a  hill  of  b'eans  before  they  are 
grown.  “All  things  come  to  the  man  who  waits,”  but  he  must 
wait.  The  finest  sign  of  culture,  says  Matthew  Arnold,  is 
never  to  be  in  a  hurry.  For  one,  I  always  suspect  the  thor¬ 
oughness  of  that  man’s  training  who  hasn’t  a  little  time  for 
doing  one  thing  more.  Michael  Angelo  chipped  the  right 
piece  of  marble  as  much  because  he  was  calm  as  because  he 
saw  which  piece  to  remove.  It  takes  time  to  understand  a 


18 


crystal,  a  flower,  a  proposition  of  Euclid,  a  law  of  physics,  the 
spectroscope,  Kant’s  Critique,  your  own  soul. 

“  Put  your  ear  against  the  earth; 

Listen  there  how  noiselessly  the  germ  o’  the  seed  has  birth- 

flow  noiselessly  and  gently  it  upheaves  its  little  way, 

Till  it  parts  the  scarcely  broken  ground,  and  the  blade  stands  up  in  the  day. 

Be  patient!  O  be  patient!  The  germs  of  mighty  thought 

Must  have  their  silent  undergrowth,  must  underground  be  wrought.” 

III.  No  soul  of  man  can  touch  the  soul  of  Being,  who  is 
not  possessed  of  Enthusiasm.  The  blase  or  cynical  spirit  is 
not  the  spirit  of  scholarship.  Such  an  one  does  not  see.  It 
is  the  God-intoxicated  man,  as  Spinoza  was  justly  called, 
who  alone  has  the  insight  of  genius  into  the  works  of  God. 
Let  him  who  wishes  focus  cultivate  an  eager,  persistent,  per¬ 
ennial  quest  for  truth.  It  is  a  lamentable  fact  that  many 
men,  possibly  the  majority  of  men,  cease  to  grow  after  their 
fortieth  year.  They  become  content  with  acquired  knowl¬ 
edge,  powers,  resources;  what  they  have  enables  them  to 
meet  the  ordinary  duties  of  their  calling.  The  practical 
duties  of  life  absorb  attention  and  energy,  and  they  easily 
crystallize  in  forms  of  readiest  habit.  Beware  of  that 
“pou  sto”  which  checks  your  aspiration  for  a  loftier  leverage. 
There  are  heavens  on  heavens.  A  dash  of  infinity  must 
overspread  the  mind  of  him  who  is  to  reflect  the'  eternal. 
You  cannot  see  things  as  they  are,  if  you  are  not  supremely 
eager  to  see  them.  You  will  not  be  eager  to  see  them  if  their 
myriad  variety,  beauty,  skill,  do  not  fill  you  with  a  passionate 
conviction  that  they  are  worth  the  seeing.  Back  of  all  quest 
for  truth,  behind  all  the  other  adjustments  of  discipline  or 
circumstance  in  the  interests  of  the  discovery  of  truth,  lies 
the  divine  assurance  that  nothing  is  so  valuable  as  truth,  the 
passion  for  knowledge,  the  enthusiasm  that  will  not  stop,  the 
ardor  that  never  burns  out,  the  ambition  that  never  is 
satisfied. 

I  watched  a  tiny,  green  worm  the  other  day.  Out  of 
himself  he  spun  a  fine  silken  thread,  one,  two,  three,  four 
feet  long.  Then  he  stopped,  carefully  pulled  himself  up  by 
the  thread  of  his  own  making,  and  rolling  it  into  a  minute 
ball  within  his  microscopic  feet,  he  ascended  until  reaching 
his  starting  point  he  left  the  curious  ball  and  went  away. 


19 


Will  yon  tell  me  that  that  seemingly  insignificant  fraction 
of  life  is  really  of  no  concern?  I  answer,  there  are  lessons 
to  learn  from  that  little  worm,  of  which  our  deepest  philoso¬ 
phy  yet  has  not  dreamed.  We  may  divide  and  subdivide, 
and  subdivide  again;  we  may  specialize  and  particularize 
till  we  seem  to  have  reached  the  limit  of  partition.  That 
infinitesimal  division  of  life,  or  nature,  or  thought,  is  really 
infinite  in  its  significance,  and  the  veriest  “  infusoria,”  who 
are  born  and  die  as  we  look,  may  be  “  an  epiphany  of  God.” 
If  the  world  shall  grow  old,  it  will  be  beause  you  have  aged. 
Truth  is  perennially  young.  Her  devotees  never  age. 

IV.  Is  the  complement  of  this  requirement  its  opposite? 
Yet  is  it  not  its  contradictory.  It  is  absolutely  essential  for 
true  vision  that  the  observer  be  filled  with  a  spirit  of  com¬ 
plete  Indifference.  We  fail  to  see  nature  because,  with 
obtrusive  personality,  we  make  it  the  mirror  of  our  preju¬ 
dices,  conceits,  ambitions.  I  visited  the  cairn  that  covered 
the  grave  of  a  beloved  American  poet.  The  vulgar  egotism 
of  a  hundred  tourists  had  covered  the  pile  with  their  visiting 
cards.  It  was  an  act  of  pious  homage  to  the  dead,  and  of 
indignant  rebuke  to  the  senseless  living,  to  tear  these  bits  of 
paste-board  into  countless  pieces  and  give  them  to  the  winds. 
Is  man  God?  Am  I  the  universe?  Is  the  finite  the  infinite? 
Is  the  temporal  the  eternal?  Are  we  afraid  of  truth?  I  pity 
that  man  who  makes  his  present  attainments  in  truth  the 
measure  of  truth  itself.  An  honorable  teacher  said  on  his 
dying  bed,  some  months  ago:  “I  believe  now  as  always  I 
have  believed.  In  sixty  years  my  views  have  not  changed  a 
particle — not  a  particle.”  He  was  a  good,  a  conscientious 
man,  but  I  cannot  hold  him  up  as  an  object  of  imitation  for 
the  studious  youth  of  our  land.  A  man  ought  to  change  in  sixty 
years — I  cannot  conceive  how,  if  he  be  an  eager  pursuer  after 
truth,  possessed  of  that  candor  which  is  necessary  for  truth’s 
discovery,  he  can  fail  to  change  in  sixty  years.  As  well  ex¬ 
pect  yonder  majestic  peak  to  look  the  same  at  its  base  as 
twenty  miles  out  on  the  plains.  There  need  not  be  revolu¬ 
tion  as  we  progress  in  life;  there  surely  ought  to  be  evolution. 
The  trouble  is,  many  men  are  timid.  We  fear  our  cause  will 


20 


fail,  and  our  cause  is,  we  fancy,  truth.  What  is  candor  but 
trust?  What  is  that  indifference  to  results  and  consequences 
for  which  I  plead,  but  a  sublime  affirmation  of  essential  faith? 
I  see  more  faith  in  a  Darwin  than  in  the  bishop  that  anathe¬ 
matizes  him.  Give  me  a  Schleiermacher  above  a  Hengsten- 
berg.  Trust  the  intuitions  of  your  soul.  Trust  the  deliver¬ 
ances  of  nature.  Be  not  afraid  or  concerned.  Go  where 
truth  takes  you.  The  arms  of  the  Eternal  are  beneath  you, 
and  they  will  not  let  you  fall.  There  is  no  hesitancy  in  the 
artist’s  plate  as  it  looks  through  the  camera’s  lens  to  picture 
us  as  we  are.  We  may  be  old  or  we  may  be  young.  We  may 
be  ugly  or  we  may  be  beautiful.  It  makes  no  difference. 
Coated  with  its  sensitive  film  the  plate  is  adjusted  to  its 
work,  and  it  will,  without  prejudice,  without  anxiety,  with 
utter  indifference,  image  us  as  we  are.  Is  the  human  mind 
to  be  less  candid  than  a  machine  ?  Shall  not  the  observing 
spirit  be  as  fair  as  a  photographer’s  plate?  He  who  would 
see  what  nature  has  to  make  known  should  cultivate  a  holy 
calm,  so  serene,  so  constant,  so  profound,  a  candor  so  just, 
so  pure,  that  amid  all  the  eddies  of  transient  discussion,  it 
shall  buoy  him  up  as  on  the  mighty  current,  the  majestic, 
undeviating  stream  of  truth. 

Intensity,  passivity;  enthusiasm,  indifference:  concentra¬ 
tion,  patience;  search,  candor — these  are  required  adjust¬ 
ments  ere  our  minds  are  focused  on  the  world  without  or  the 
world  within. 

Some  things  grow  out  of  what  I  have  said  that  I  wish  to 
make  clear: 

First — I  have,  I  hope,  said  enough  to  show  the  signifi¬ 
cance  of  much  in  a  liberal  training  that  is  sometimes  in 
danger  of  being  ignored  by  the  student.  If  you  will  go  into  a 
large  observatory  you  will  notice  a  good  deal  of  machinery 
that  at  first  may  seem  needless.  But  when  the  lens  is  turned 
starward,  those  wheels  and  levers  come  into  full  use.  Musi¬ 
cians  need  prolonged  routine  practice  ere  they  can  delight 
the  hearer;  and  when  a  trained  orchestra  meets  for  public  per¬ 
formance,  even  Beethoven’s  Seventh  Symphony  is  preceded 
by  the  disagreeable  tuning  up  of  preparation.  You  see  no 


21 


value  in  that  tough  problem  of  algebra  or  geometry?  You 
will  value  its  discipline  later  on.  Only  patient  toil  can  enable 
a  student  to  unfold  the  four  hundred  parts  of  a  Latin  verb. 
He  will  appreciate  the  attention,  exactness,  powers  of  com¬ 
parison  developed  in  that  toil,  when  life’s  work  is  on  him. 
The  symbols  and  formulas  of  chemistry  have  a  value  beyond 
themselves.  The  military  habits  of  the  training  field,  the 
reverence,  humility,  aspiration  of  the  chapel  are  all  processes 
in  adjustment — movements  toward  the  focus  sought. 

Second — One  sees  the  importance  of  a  prolonged  training. 
The  world  stands  open  for  our  mastery  as  never  before;  but 
this  is  no  age  for  incompetents.  This  is  no  time  for  shorten¬ 
ing  the  courses  of  training  preparatory  to  the  work  of  life. 
Still  less  should  the  West  be  content  with  other  than  the 
most  thoroughly  trained,  the  most  elaborately  disciplined 
men  for  her  leaders.  Let  us  put  the  ban  on  pettifogging 
lawyers,  self-made  doctors,  short-cut  preachers,  boy  engineers, 
callow  chemists,  ranger  XDoliticians,  backwoods  legislators — 
quacks  of  every  sort.  We  are  organizing  our  industries, 
developing  our  educational  institutions,  forming  our  habits 
of  social  life,  determining  thje  methods  of  our  religious 
activity.  We  are  building  for  the  future.  A  common  man 
can  maintain  an  interest  already  established.  It  takes  a 
rarer  man  to  found  on  solid  bases  institutions  to  endure. 
W  e  are  face  to  face  with  a  new  era.  The  extraordinary  pro¬ 
gress  of  invention,  the  unparalleled  success  of  great  explorers, 
the  steady  onmarching  of  physical  science,  the  breaking 
down  of  venerable  political  institutions,  the  great  movements 
of  immigration,  the  ferment  of  religious  thought,  the  uneasi¬ 
ness  in  industrial  circles,  the  plea  for  a  more  truly  social 
order,  the  increasing  sensitiveness  to  human  misfortune, 
these,  and  a  score  of  signs  beside,  point  to  the  dawn  of  a  new 
and,  let  us  hope,  a  better  age.  But  periods  of  transition,  in 
men,  nations,  races,  humanity,  are  always  periods  of  danger. 
Then  is  needed  the  trained  guide.  Then  is  wanted  the  wise 
counsellor,  taught  by  a  wide  induction  from  the  past,  caught 
by  no  hoary  deceits  posing  as  novelties,  quick  to  distinguish 
the  seeming  from  the  real,  movement  from  progress.  I  exhort 


22 


every  young  man  or  woman,  eager  to  contribute  his  part 
toward  the  common  weal,  to  be  content  with  nothing  less 
than  the  most  he  can  secure  of  thorough,  elaborate  training 
for  the  work  of  life.  Do  not  be  in  a  hurry  to  get  to  your 
active  work.  The  world  can  wait  for  you.  It  has  waited  for 
you  countless  thousands  of  years.  It  can  wait  for  you  a  few 
years  yet.  What  you  do  in  the  world  is  to  be  measured  not 
by  the  number  of  years  you  are  at  it,  but  by  what  you  put  into 
those  years.  The  disciplined  man  can  do  more  and  do  it 
better,  in  a  given  time,  than  can  a  crude  man.  Seek  not  so 
much  to  prolong  as  to  pack  your  life. 

Finally — I  hope  I  have  suggested  something  touching 
the  relative  values  of  the  various  disciplines  through  which 
the  student  may  pass.  I  have  defined  common  sense  as  the 
power  of  seeing  things  as  they  are,  and  said  that  genius  is  but 
this  power  carried  to  a  very  high  degree.  You  can  rank  the 
geniuses  of  this  world  by  this  test.  I  cannot  assign  to  Goethe, 
for  example,  so  high  a  place  as  many  modern  critics  give  him. 
I  admire  his  versatility,  his  beautiful  versification,  his  rare 
and  even  philosophic  culture;  but  three  readings  of  Wilhelm 
Meister  do  not  reveal  to  me  the  deeper  wisdom  which  Carlyle 
professes  to  discover.  Can  a  genius  of  highest  order,  who 
sees  things  as  they  are,  give  three  volumes  of  solid  matter  to  a 
band  of  vagrant  actors,  as  fruitfulest  way  of  exhibiting  his 
own  wisdom?  Can  a  genius  of  the  first  order  leave  you  in 
doubt,  as  Goethe  usually  does  leave  you  in  doubt,  as  to 
whether  the  world  is  essential  moral?  The  supremacy  of 
ethics  is,  as  Emerson  says,  writ  on  every  atom  of  star  dust. 
“The  high  intellect  is  absolutely  one  with  moral  nature  *  * 
*  *  in  the  voice  of  Genius  I  hear  invariably  the  moral  tone, 
even  when  it  is  disowned  in  words; — health,  melody  and  a 
wider  horizon  belong  to  a  moral  sensibility.  The  finer  the 
sense  of  justice,  the  better  poet.’-  The  profoundest  things  of 
life  are  the  things  of  conscience  and  faith.  He  who  does  not 
see  that  lacks  focus.  His  sight  is  blurred,  imperfect;  in  the 
long  run,  valueless.  The  world  around  us  exists  for  the  spirit. 
John  Fiske  has  a  beautiful  passage  to  this  effect:  “On  warm 
June  mornings,  in  green  country  lanes,  with  sweet  pine  odors 


wafted  in  the  breeze  which  sighs  through  the  branches,  and 
cloud-shadows  flitting  over  far-off  blue  mountains,  while  little 
birds  sing  their  love-songs  and  golden-haired  children  weave 
garlands  of  wild  roses;  or  when  in  the  solemn  twilight  we 
listen  to  wondrous  harmonies  of  Beethoven  and  Chopin,  that 
stir  the  heart  like  voices  from  an  unseen  world;  at  such  times 
one  feels  that  the  profoundest  answer  which  science  can  give 
to  our  questionings,  is  but  a  superficial  answer  after  all.  At 
these  moments,  when  the  world  seems  fullest  of  beauty,  one 
feels  most  strongly  that  it  is  but  the  harbinger  of  something 
else, —  that  the  ceaseless  play  of  phenomena  is  no  mere  sport 
of  Titans,  but  an  orderly  scene,  with  its  reason  for  existing,  its 

‘  One  divine  far-off  event 
To  which  the  whole  creation  moves.’  ” 

Young  men  and  women,  that  is  insight;  here  is  a  speci¬ 
men  of  perspective  that  sees  all  nature  tributary  to  man; 
that  sees  man  as  first  of  all  moral,  and  because  it  sees  man 
as  supreme  and  moral,  therefore  sees  him  as  immortal. 

Keep  in  mind  as  you  progress  in  your  studies  of  prepara¬ 
tion,  or  as  you  go  out  into  your  life  duties,  that  you  are  more 
than  any  life-work  you  may  choose.  Be,  not  seem.  Do,  not 
dream.  Through  each  of  you  the  Soul  of  the  universe  has  a 
separate  message  to  give  the  world.  Find  out  what  that  mes¬ 
sage  is.  Deliver  it  as  confidently  as  should  a  commissioned 
prophet  of  the  Most  High.  Dare  to  think.  Be  afraid  to  stop 
thinking.  Dare  to  act.  With  the  ardor  of  a  patient,  truth- 
loving  soul,  dare  to  achieve,  to  be.  “This  above  all,  to  thine 
own  self  be  true,  and  it  must  follow,  as  the  night  the  day, 
thou  canst  not  then  be  false  to  any  man.” 

May  I,  as  I  wish  you  all  prosperity  in  your  future  course, 
ere  I  take  my  seat,  commend  to  you  these  sweet  lines  of  the 
saintly  George  Herbert : 

“  For  us  the  winds  do  blow, 

The  earth  doth  rest,  heaven  move,  and  fountains  flow 
******* 

“  More  servants  wait  on  man 
Than  he’ll  take  notice  of.  In  every  path 
He  treads  down  that  which  doth  befriend  him 
When  sickness  makes  him  pale  and  wan. 

O,  mightie  love.  Man  is  one  world,  and  hath 
Another  to  attend  him. 


24 


“  Since  then,  my  God,  thou  hast 
So  brave  a  palace  built,  oh  dwell  in  it, 

That  it  may  dwell  with  thee  at  last  ! 

Till  then  afford  us  so  much  wit 

That,  as  the  world  serves  us,  we  may  serve  thee 
And  both  thy  servants  be.” 

This  is  focus;  the  vision  of  things  that  are,  and  are  to  be. 


t 


\ 


ADDRESS 

TO  THE  GRADUATING  CLASS  OF  COLORADO  COLLEGE. 


By  James  H.  Baker. 


J  line  1 1 . 


Standpoint  of  the  Scholar. 

For  a  thousand  years  before  the  Teuton  appeared  on  the 
scene  of  civilization  the  sages  had  been  teaching  in  the 
agora  of  Athens  and  in  the  groves  and  gardens  of  its  environs. 
There  profound  subjective  philosophies  were  imparted  to 
eager  seekers  for  truth,  and  in  the  schools  geometry,  rhetoric, 
music,  and  gymnastics  gave  to  the  Attic  youth  a  culture 
more  refined  than  was  ever  possessed  by  any  other  people. 
The  Athenians  were  familiar  with  a  literature  which,  for 
purity  and  elegance  of  style,  was  never  surpassed.  The 
Greeks  believed  with  Plato,  that  “  rhythm  and  harmony  find 
their  way  into  the  secret  places  of  the  soul,  on  which  they 
mightily  fasten,  bearing  grace  in  their  movements  and  mak¬ 
ing  the  soul  graceful  of  him  who  is  rightly  educated.”  There 
temples  rose  with  stately  column  and  sculptured  frieze,  and 
art  fashioned  marble  in  the  images  of  the  gods  with  a  tran¬ 
scendent  skill  that  gave  an  enduring  name  to  many  of  its 
devotees. 

Meantime  our  ancestors  were  wandering  westward  through 
the  forests  of  Europe,  or  were  dwelling  for  a  time  in  thatched 
huts  on  some  fertile  plain,  or  in  some  inviting  glade  or  grove. 
But  these  children  of  the  forest — almost  savages — possessed 
the  genius  of  progress,  a  power  that  turned  to  its  own  uses 
the  civilization  of  the  past  and  almost  wholly  determined  the 
character  of  modern  history.  They  highly  esteemed  inde¬ 
pendence  and  honor.  In  their  estimate  of  woman  they  stood 
above  the  people  of  antiquity,  and  the  home  was  held  sacred. 
They  possessed  a  practical  and  earnest  spirit,  an  inborn  dis- 


26 


like  for  mere  formalism,  and  a  regard  for  essentials  that  later 
developed  in  scientific  discovery  and  independence  of 
thought.  The  Teuton  had  a  nature  in  which  ideas  took  a 
firm  root,  and  he  had  a  profoundly  religious  spirit,  impres¬ 
sible  by  great  religious  truths.  He  listened  to  the  rustle  of 
the  oak  leaves  in  his  sacred  groves,  as  did  the  Greeks  at 
Dodona,  and  they  whispered  to  him  of  mysterious  powers 
that  manifested  themselves  through  nature.  The  scalds,  the 
old  Teutonic  poets,  sang  in  weird  runic  rhymes  of  the 
valorous  deeds  of  their  ancestors. 

How  the  Teutons  hurled  themselves  against  the  barriers 
of  the  empire  of  Rome,  how  they  overran  the  fields  of  Italy, 
how  they  absorbed  and  assimilated  to  their  own  nature  what 
was  best  in  the  civilization  of  the  ancients,  how  they  formed 
the  nuclei  of  the  modern  nations,  how  the  renaissance  of  the 
ancient  literature  and  art  in  Italy  spread  over  Western  Europe 
and  reached  England,  and  later  an  offshoot  was  transplanted 
to  American  soil — these  and  similar  themes  constitute  some 
of  the  most  interesting  portions  of  history.  Not  least  impor¬ 
tant  is  the  fact  that  the  Roman  world  gave  the  Teutons  the 
religion  of  Christ,  that  highest  development  of  faith  in 
things  not  seen,  which,  to  the  mind  of  many  a  searcher  in 
rational  theology,  is  a  necessary  part  of  a  complete  plan  to  a 
belief  in  which  we  are  led  by  a  profoundly  contemplative 
view  of  nature  and  human  life.  We  study  the  past  to  know 
the  present.  Man  finds  himself  only  by  a  broad  view  of  the 
world  and  history,  together  with  a  deep  insight  into  his  own 
being.  Our  present  institutions  are  understood  better  when 
viewed  historically;  our  present  opportunities  and  obligations 
assume  fuller  significance.  We  choose  to-day  to  make  a  gen¬ 
eral  survey  of  our  subject,  rather  than  to  discuss  in  detail 
some  minor  phase. 

OUR  HERITAGE. 

So,  by  the  mingling  of  two  streams,  one  flowing  from 
the  sacred  founts  of  Greece  and  Rome,  the  other  springing 
from  among  the  rocks  and  pines  of  the  mediaeval  forests,  a 
current  of  civilization  was  formed  which  swept  onward  and 
broadened  into  a  placid  and  powerful  river.  Let  us  view 


27 


the  character  of  the  present  period  and  learn  to  value  what 
has  come  down  to  us  from  the  past — our  heritage  of  institu¬ 
tions  and  ideas,  a  heritage  derived  from  the  two  sources, 
Greco-Roman  and  Teutonic. 

The  independent,  practical,  investigating  energy  of  the 
Teutonic  character  has  made  this  an  age  of  scientific  dis¬ 
covery  and  material  progress.  The  forces  of  nature  are 
turned  to  man’s  uses.  The  conveniences  of  man’s  physical 
well-being  are  well-nigh  fully  supplied.  Philosophy  discovers 
and  proclaims  the  laws  of  nature’s  processes,  and  even  the 
evolutional  doctrines  teach  that,  in  view  of  every  phenome¬ 
non,  we  are  in  the  presence  of  an  inscrutable  energy  that 
orders  and  sustains  all  nature’s  manifestations.  The  ideas 
of  the  Christian  religion,  universally  received  by  the  new 
peoples,  in  the  course  of  centuries  have  forced  themselves  in 
their  full  meaning  upon  the  minds  of  men,  and  they  deter¬ 
mine  more  than  all  else  the  altruistic  spirit  of  the  age.  Altru¬ 
ism  is  the  soul  of  Christianity;  it  has  become  a  forceful  and  . 
practical  idea,  and  it  promises  greater  changes  in  political 
and  social  conditions  than  the  world  has  ever  seen.  The 
religious  revolt  of  the  sixteenth  century  is  a  Teutonic  inheri¬ 
tance — a  revolt  which  transmitted  some  evils,  but  abjured 
formalism  and  based  merit  upon  the  essential,  conscious  atti¬ 
tude  of  man.  If  the  impulse  that  grew  into  the  revolution 
of  the  eighteenth  century  and  led  to  political  emancipation 
was  not  of  Teutonic  origin,  it  was  received  and  cherished 
everywhere  by  Teutonic  people,  and  was  carried  by  them  to 
permanent  conclusions.  The  modern  Teuton  is  found  in  his 
highest  development  in  the  intelligent  American  of  to-day. 
Times  have  changed  with  the  onward  flow  of  history.  The 
ancient  Teuton  caught  up  the  torch  of  civilization,  and  in 
the  fourteen  centuries  since  has  carried  it  far.  It  is,  per¬ 
haps,  a  return  kindly  made  by  fate  that  the  light  of  that 
torch  was  for  many  a  year  a  beacon  to  benighted  Italy.  The 
modern  Teuton  extends  to  her  the  hand  of  enlightened  sym¬ 
pathy,  and  remembers  in  gratitude  the  great  gift  received 
from  her  in  the  long  past. 


28 


And  then  we  inherit  from  the  ancients,  those  master  minds 
that  were  the  authors  of  great  conceptions  when  the  world 
was  young.  Greece  was  the  Shakespeare  of  the  ancient 
world.  It  transmuted  all  that  it  had  received  from  the  na¬ 
tions  of  the  Orient  into  forms  of  surpassing  genius,  even  as 
the  great  master  of  the  Elizabethan  period  of  our  era  turned 
all  that  he  touched  into  precious  metal.  When  the  world 
was  crude,  and  no  great  originals  were  before  men  to  imitate,  it 
meant  much  to  create,  and  create  so  perfectly  that  the  works 
have  ever  since  been  the  ideals  for  all  peoples.  Phidias  and 
Apelles,  Pericles  and  Demosthenes,  Homer  and  Euripides, 
Herodotus  and  Xenophon,  Aristides,  Socrates  and  Plato  and 
Aristotle — artists,  statesmen,  orators,  poets,  historians,  men 
great  and  just,  philosophers!  Can  we  wonder  that  the  glory 
of  their  names  increases  with  time?  They  were  men  whom 
no  truly  independent  worker  ever  surpassed.  No  wonder 
the  soil  of  Greece  is  sacred,  and  that  men  of  to-day  go  back 
in  imagination  across  the  chasm  of  ages  and  visit  it  with 
reverential  spirit.  No  wonder  we  still  go  to  the  original 
sources  for  culture  and  inspiration.  No  wonder  the  great 
and  noble  men  of  Greece  are  still  among  the  best  examples 
for  the  instruction  of  youth.  The  pass  at  Thermopylae, 
where  perished  the  three  hundred,  the  Parthenon,  are  hal¬ 
lowed  by  sacred  memories.  And  then  the  marvelous  love  of 
the  Greeks  for  nature.  They  saw  it  instinct  with  life,  and 
in  fancy  beheld  some  personal  power  moving  in  the  zephyr, 
or  flowing  with  the  river,  or  dwelling  in  the  growing  tree. 
Their  mythology  has  become  the  handmaid  of  literature. 
Parnassus,  Apollo  and  the  Sacred  Nine  command  almost  a 
belief  with  our  reverence.  If  the  seats  on  the  sacred  mount 
are  already  filled  with  the  great  men  of  the  past,  we  at  least 
can  sit  at  their  feet.  The  study  of  the  humanities  has  a 
peculiar  value,  because  it  develops  distinctively  human  pos¬ 
sibilities.  Thought  and  language  are  mysteriously  con¬ 
nected.  One  of  the  most  noted  philologists  of  the  age  claims 
that  thought  without  language  is  impossible.  The  use  of 
language  helps  to  develop  concepts.  Fine  literature,  with  its 
elevated  thoughts,  its  beauty  of  expression,  constructs,  as  it 


29 


were,  the  best  channels  for  original  expression..  Art  strives 
for  perfection,  cultivates  ideals,  refines  and  ennobles.  It 
creates  an  understanding  of  all  the  ideals  that  may  be  in¬ 
cluded  in  the  categories  of  the  True,  the  Beautiful,  and  the 
Good;  hence  the  interpretation  of  the  aphorism  of  Goethe, 
“  The  beautiful  is  greater  than  the  good,  for  it  includes  the 
good  and  adds  something  to  it.”  Art  gives  strength  to  the 
aspirations,  and  lends  wings  to  the  spirit.  The  study  of 
the  humanities  is  a  grand  means  of  real  development. 

The  present  offers  the  student  two  sides  of  education — the 
modern  and  the  classic,  the  sciences  and  the  humanities. 
Ever  since  the  Baconian  method  was  given  to  the  world  the 
interest  in  science  has  steadily  increased,  until  now  there  is 
danger  of  neglecting  the  classic  side.  Each  kind  of  educa¬ 
tion  has  its  value;  either  alone  makes  a  one-sided  man;  let 
neither  be  neglected. 

In  this  country  to-day  the  student  moves  in  the  vanguard 
of  progress;  he  is  heir  to  all  that  is  best  in  the  past,  and  his 
heritage  makes  for  him  opportunities  full  of  promise. 

If  the  hearer  has  already  mentally  asked  what  connection 
these  things  have  with  the  subject,  it  may  be  answered, 
“This  is  not  logic,  but  a  view,  as  it  were  a  picture,  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  scholar,  and  those  things  are  painted  which 
naturally  fall  within  the  line  of  vision.  Each  part  will  in¬ 
sensibly  contribute  to  the  general  effect  intended.” 

OPPORTUNITIES. 

All  the  soul-growth  of  our  ancestors  modifies  the  mech¬ 
anism  of  our  intellectual  processes,  and  gives  us  minds  that 
fall  into  rhythm  with  the  march  of  ideas.  We  profit  by  all 
the  past  has  done;  the  active  factors  in  this  age  of  freedom — 
intellectual,  spiritual  and  political — are  multiplied  by  mil¬ 
lions,  and  each  profits  by  the  efforts  of  all.  Golden  vistas  of 
future  possibilities  open  up.  Intellectual  acquirement  is  a 
duty;  to  be  ignorant  is  to  be  behind  the  spirit  of  the  time. 
There  are  problems  yet  to  be  solved;  there  are  duties  to  our¬ 
selves  and  the  age.  Every  individual  tendency,  fitness  and 
inclination  can  be  met  by  the  diversity  of  occupations, 


30 


of  knowledge,  and  of  fields  of  investigation.  Men  of  moral 
stamina  are  still  needed  to  stand  for  all  that  is  best.  New 
ideals  are  to  be  created  that  shall  typify  an  age  which  yet 
lacks  poetic  expression.  When  we  consider  the  evolution  of 
man  and  of  institutions,  we  see  that  we  are  very  far  from 
perfection,  and  that  each  period  of  history  is  a  period  of  de¬ 
velopment.  We  read  of  the  brutal  traits  of  our  ancestors, 
their  ignorance  and  their  superstition,  how  they  made  blood¬ 
shed  and  death  a  pastime,  and  we  can  still  discover  the  same 
tendencies,  only  more  refined  and  better  controlled.  Along 
the  avenue  of  progress  we  march  toward  the  high  destiny  of 
the  race.  Evolution  is  the  law  both  of  Spencer  and  of  Hegel. 
Every  struggle  of  an  earnest  soul  gives  impetus  to  the 
movement. 

EDUCATION. 

A  Shakespeare,  reared  on  the  steppes  of  Central  Asia, 
among  the  Tartar  hordes  of  Genghis  Khan,  would  have  been 
a  savage — a  poetic  savage,  perhaps,  but  still  a  savage — blood¬ 
thirsty,  restless,  and  wild.  Born  of  a  primitive  race,  in  some 
sunny  clime,  he  would  have  looked  dreamily  upon  the  world 
and  life,  somewhat  as  an  animal  of  the  forest;  he  would  have 
fed  on  the  spontaneous  products  of  nature,  and  have  reposed 
under  the  shadow  of  his  palm  tree.  Shakespeare  of  Eng¬ 
land,  by  a  long  process  of  education,  gained  the  ideas  of  his 
age  and  the  culture  of  the  great  civilizations  of  the  past. 
His  education  and  the  forceful  ideas  of  a  period  of  thought 
and  reformation  and  investigation  stimulated  the  distinct¬ 
ively  human  intelligence,  and  awakened  subjective  analysis 
and  poetic  fancy,  and  he  made  true  pictures  of  human  char¬ 
acter — world  types — in  history,  tragedy,  and  comedy.  Educa¬ 
tion  enables  man  to  begin  real  life  where  the  previous  age 
left  off.  It  is  an  inherited  capital.  Ideas,  fancies,  principles, 
laws,  discoveries,  experience  from  failures,  which  were  the 
work  of  centuries,  are  furnished  ready  at  hand  as  tools  for 
the  intellectual  workman.  The  present  is  understood  in  the 
light  of  history;  the  methods  of  investigating  nature  are 
transmitted.  The  growth  of  the  race  is  epitomized  in  the 
individual. 


31 


Let  us  look  at  the  sphere  of  education.  Here  is  the  world 
of  infinite  variety,  form,  and  color.  The  savage  looks  upon  it 
with  superstitious  wonder,  and,  perhaps,  with  a  kind  of  sen¬ 
suous  enjoyment.  He  knows  not  how  to  wield  nature  to 
practical  ends.  But  the  book  of  science  is  opened  to  him 
through  education.  He  learns  the  secrets  of  nature’s  labora¬ 
tory  and,  as  with  magic  wand,  he  marshals  the  atoms  and 
causes  new  forms  of  matter  to  appear  for  his  uses.  He  learns 
the  manifestations  and  transmutations  of  nature’s  forces,  and 
he  trains  them  to  obey  his  will  and  do  his  work.  He  observes 
how,  under  the  influence  of  a  distinct  order  of  forces,  organic 
forms  rise  on  the  face  of  nature  and  develop  into  higher  and 
higher  classes,  and,  incidentally,  he  learns  the  uses  of  vege¬ 
table  products.  He  knows  the  laws  of  number;  commodities, 
structures  and  forces  are  quantitatively  estimated,  and  material 
progress  becomes  possible.  He  traces  the  history  of  nations 
and  understands  the  problems  of  the  present.  He  catches 
the  inspiration  of  the  geniuses  of  literature,  and  he  rises  to  a 
level  with  the  great  minds  of  the  earth;  he  becomes  a  creature 
of  ideas,  sentiments,  aspirations  and  ideals,  instead  of  remain¬ 
ing  a  mere  animal.  He  learns  the  languages  of  cultured 
peoples,  and  gets  at  their  inner  life;  learns  their  concepts, 
the  polish  of  their  expression,  and  becomes  more  enlightened 
and  refined.  He  studies  the  subjective  side  of  man,  that 
which  is  a  mirror  of  all  that  is  objective,  and  he  understands 
his  own  powers  and  possibilities,  and  the  laws  of  human 
growth.  He  studies  philosophy,  and  he  stands  face  to  face 
with  the  ultimate  conceptions  of  creation  and  gains  a  basis 
for  his  thought  and  conduct.  All  these  things  are  from  the 
practical  point  of  view;  they  pertain  to  the  making  of  a 
useful  and  strong  man — master  over  the  forces  of  nature,  able 
to  use  ideas  for  practical  ends,  and  capable  of  continuous 
growth. 

But  knowledge  as  such,  its  use  for  manhood  and  happi¬ 
ness,  are  often  underestimated.  To  know  the  processes  and 
history  of  inorganic  nature,  to  trace  the  growth  of  worlds 
and  know  their  movements,  and  number  the  starry  hosts,  to 
study  the  structure  and  development  of  all  organic  life,  to 


32 


know  the  infallible  laws  of  mathematics,  to  live  amid  the 
deeds  of  men  of  all  ages,  to  imbibe  their  richest  thoughts,  to 
stand  in  presence  of  the  problems  of  the  infinite,  make  a 
mere  animal  man  almost  a  god.  elevate  him  toward  the  real¬ 
ization  of  the  great  possibilities  of  his  being.  Imagine  a 
man  born  in  a  desert  land,  and  shut  in  by  the  walls  of  a  tent 
from  the  glories  of  nature.  Imagine  him  to  have  matured  in 
body  with  no  thought  or  language  other  than  pertaining  to 
the  needs  of  physical  existence.  Imagine  him,  since  we  may 
imagine  the  impossible,  to  have  a  fully  developed  power  for 
intellectual  grasp  and  emotional  life.  Then  open  up  to  him 
the  beauty  of  the  forest,  the  poetry  of  the  sea,  the  grandeur 
of  the  mountains,  and  the  sublimity  of  the  starry  heavens; 
let  him  read  the  secrets  of  nature;  present  to  him  the  writings 
of  men  whose  lives  have  been  enriched  by  their  own  labor, 
and  whose  faces  radiate  an  almost  divine  expression  born  of 
good  thoughts;  reveal  to  him  the  glowing  concepts  that  find 
expression  through  the  chisel  or  brush  of  the  artist,  and  give 
him  a  view  from  the  summit  of  philosophy.  Would  he  not 
look  irpon  nature  as  a  marvelous  temple  of  infinite  propor¬ 
tions,  adorned  with  priceless  gems  and  frescoed  with  master 
hand?  Would  he  not  regard  art  and  thought  as  divinely 
inspired?  And  this  picture  is  hardly  overdrawn;  such  a 
contrast — only  less  in  degree — lies  between  the  vicious,  igno¬ 
rant  boor,  given  to  animal  ifieasures,  and  the  scholar.  Learn¬ 
ing  draws  aside  the  tent -folds  and  reveals  the  wonders  of  the 
temple.  Man  must  have  enjoyment;  if  not  intellectual,  then 
it  will  be  sensuous  and  degrading.  Here  is  an  enjoyment 
that  does  not  pall,  a  stimulous  that  does  not  react,  a  gratifi¬ 
cation  that  elevates. 

Moreover,  education  trains  the  powers  through  knowl¬ 
edge.  The  power  to  observe  accurately  the  world  of  beauty 
and  wonder;  the  power  to  recombine  and  modify  in  infinite 
kaleidoscopic  forms  the  percepts  and  images  of  the  mind, 
making  possible  all  progress;  the  power  to  elaborate,  verify 
and  generalize;  the  power  to  feel  the  greatness  of  truth,  the 
rhythms  and  harmonies  of  the  world  and  the  beauty  of  its 
forms;  the  power  to  perceive  and  feel  the  right;  the  power 


33 


to  guide  one’s  self  in  pursuit  of  tlie  best;  these  are  worth 
more  than  mere  practical  acquisitions  and  mere  knowledge, 
for  they  make  possible  all  acquisition  and  growth  and 
enjoyment. 

The  thoughtless  person  who  argues  against  education 
little  knows  how  much  he  and  all  are  indebted  to  it.  The 
demand  for  general  intelligence  is  increasing,  and  the  capa¬ 
bilities  of  the  race  for  knowledge  are  greater  with  each 
educated  generation.  Earnest  men  are  endeavoring  to  make 
a  degree  of  culture  almost  universal,  as  witness  the  “Chau¬ 
tauqua  Scheme”  and  the  plan  of  “University  Extension.” 
Education,  too,  adheres  less  rigidly  to  the  old  lines,  and  men 
can  gain  a  more  purely  English  training.  A  course  of  study 
leading  to  a  degree  has  recently  been  established  in  the 
University  of  Pennsylvania,  which  shall  give  scientific  prep¬ 
aration  for  banking  and  general  business.  These  schemes 
are  useful  because  they  tend  to  popularize  education,  and 
they  reach  a  class  which  would  not  be  reached  by  the  usual 
courses  of  study. 

But  there  is  danger  of  departing  from  the  ideal  types  of 
education — education  for  general  training  and  knowledge  and 
manhood.  Not  that  traditional  courses  must  be  rigidly 
adhered  to,  for  a  new  field  of  learning  has  been  opened  in 
which  may  be  acquired  a  knowledge  of  material  nature.  But, 
in  the  rage  for  the  new,  the  modern  side  of  education,  there 
is  danger  of  neglecting  the  ancient,  the  classic  side,  the 
humanities.  Language  and  literature,  and  history  and  phil¬ 
osophy  and  art,  since  they  train  the  expression  and  present 
ideal  thoughts,  and  teach  the  motives  of  men  and  the  nature 
and  destiny  of  the  human  race,  since  they  deal  with  the 
spiritual  more  than  the  material,  since  they  belong  exclu¬ 
sively  to  man,  since  they  stimulate  the  activity  of  divine 
powers  and  instincts,  since  they  are  peculiarly  useful  as 
mental  gymnastics,  since  they  are  culturing  and  refining — 
they  still  have  and  always  will  have  a  high  value  in  ideal 
education.  The  ancient  side  and  the  modern  side  should 
fairly  share  the  honors  in  a  college  course. 


34 


The  arguments  for  so-called  practical  education  are  fal¬ 
lacious,  whenever  the  nature,  time  and  possibilities  of  the 
pupil  will  enable  him  to  develop  anything  more  than  the 
bread-winning  capabilities.  When  one  knows  the  line  of 
mathematics,  his  knowledge  can  be  applied  in  the  art  of 
bookkeeping  with  a  minimum  effort.  Bookkeeping  is  a  mere 
incident  in  the  line  of  mathematical  work.  A  year  in  a 
school  of  general  education,  even  to  the  prospective  clerk  or 
merchant,  should  be  worth  ten  times  the  year  spent  in  prac¬ 
tice  of  mechanical  processes.  United  States  history  is 
valuable  to  an  American  youth,  but,  while  with  one  view 
America  is  in  the  forefront  of  the  march  of  progress,  there 
is  another  view  in  which  our  century  of  history  is  only 
an  eddy  in  the  great  flow  of  historical  events.  The  present 
can  be  understood  only  historically,  and  the  grand  elements 
of  our  civilization  should  be  known  in  the  light  of  the  world’s 
history. 

Not  only  should  we  adhere  to  our  faith  in  university  edu¬ 
cation,  but  we  can  find  reasons  for  raising  the  standard  of  a 
part  of  university  work.  Even  now,  no  student  should  receive 
a  j)rofessional  degree  who  has  not  previously  obtained  at  least 
a  complete  high  school  education;  and  the  time  may  come 
when  at  least  two  years  of  college  life  will  be  required  as  a 
basis  for  a  doctor’s  or  a  lawyer’s  degree.  Graduate  courses 
are  becoming  a  prominent  feature  of  some  institutions,  and 
in  time  a  Ph.  D.  may  be  sought  as  an  A.  B.  has  been  in  the 
past.  As  the  race  advances,  the  preparation  for  active  life 
will  necessarily  enlarge. 

FORCE  OF  IDEAS. 

Many  know  but  little  of  the  forces  that  move  the  world. 
Material  progress  does  not  make  the  spirit  of  the  age,  but  the 
spirit  of  the  age  makes  material  progress.  The  outward 
works  of  man  are  a  result  of  the  promptings  of  the  inner 
spirit.  It  is  the  spirit  of  a  nation  that  wins  battles,  the 
spirit  of  a  nation  that  makes  inventions.  Take  away  ideals 
and  the  world  would  be  inert.  It  is  spirit  that  makes  the 
difference  between  the  American  soldier  fighting  for  his  lib¬ 
erty  and  the  Hessian  hireling  or  the  old  Italian  condottieri 


f 


35 


who  played  at  war  for  the  highest  bidder.  %  Here  is  the  differ¬ 
ence  between  a  slave  and  a  freeman,  between  the  oppressed 
of  old  countries  and  the  free  American. 

Ideas  move  the  world.  It  is  related  that  in  the  second 
Messenian  war  the  Spartans,  obeying  the  Delphic  oracle,  sent 
to  Athens  for  a  leader,  and  the  Athenians,  in  contempt,  sent 
them  a  lame  schoolmaster.  But  the  schoolmaster  had  within 
him  the  spirit  of  song,  and  he  so  inspired  the  Spartans  that 
they  finally  gained  the  victory.  In  the  contests  with  Eng¬ 
land,  during  the  time  of  the  Edwards,  the  national  spirit  of 
Wales  was  aroused  and  sustained  by  the  songs  of  her  bards. 
The  “Marseillaise  Hymn”  helped  to  keep  alive  the  fire  on 
the  altar  of  French  liberty.  It  is  only  as  man  has  hope, 
aspirations,  courage,  that  he  acts,  and  in  order  to  progress  he 
must  act  toward  ideals.  The  mind  imagines  higher  things  to 
be  attained,  and  endeavor  follows. 

Natural  features  of  sea  or  forest  or  mountain  or  desert 
have  something  to  do  with  the  character  and  ideas  of  a 
people;  so,  also,  the  material  wealth  in  lands  and  buildings. 
But  to  understand  the  great  movements  of  history,  we  must 
look  at  the  great  psychical  factors.  Our  heritage  of  ideas, 
our  love  of  liberty,  our  Puritan  standards,  our  hatred  of 
tyranny,  our  independence  of  spoirit,  are  strong  characteristics 
that  make  us  a  distinctive  and  progressive  people.  It  was 
an  idea  that  gave  England  her  Magna  Charta;  that  made  us 
a  free  and  independent  nation;  that  preserved  our  union. 

A  man  makes  a  labor-saving  invention,  and  the  ease  and 
luxury  of  physical  living  are  increased,  and  men  bless  the 
inventor  and  proclaim  that  the  practical  man  is  the  only  man 
who  is  of  use  to  the  world.  Another  gives  to  the  world  a 
thought.  It  may  be  a  great  work  of  art,  a  song,  or  a 
philosophy,  and  it  takes  possession  of  men  and  becomes  an 
incentive  to  noble  living,  and  the  race  has  truly  progressed. 
Let  the  spirit  that  possesses  our  people  die  out  and  all 
material  prosperity  would  perish. 

In  primitive  times,  when  men  lived  in  caves,  and,  as 
Charles  Lamb  humorously  says,  went  to  bed  early  because 
they  had  nothing  else  to  do,  and  grumbled  at  each  other,  and 


36 


in  the  absence  of  candles,  were  obliged  to  feel  of  their  com¬ 
rades’  faces  to  catch  the  smile  of  appreciation  at  their  jokes, — 
then,  if  a  great  man  had  a  thought,  he  related  it  to  his 
neighbor,  and  his  neighbor  told  it  to  a  friend,  and  it  did 
good.  Later  a  great  man  had  a  thought,  and  he  wrote  it  out 
laboriously  on  a  parchment,  and  loaned  it  to  his  neighbor, 
and  he  sent  it  to  his  friend,  and  many  came,  sometimes 
from  far,  to  read  it,  and  it  did  more  good.  In  our  age  a  great 
man  had  a  thought  and  he  printed  it  in  a  book,  and  thousands 
read  it,  and  it  was  translated  into  many  tongues,  and  his 
words  became  household  words,  and  the  race  had  taken  a 
step  forward.  The  world  advances  more  rapidly  to-day 
because  ideas  spread  with  such  facility. 

What  is  called,  contemptuously,  “  book-learning,”  the 
education  of  young  men  in  the  schools,  helps  to  preserve  and 
increase,  and  make  useful,  and  transmit  all  the  discoveries 
and  the  best  thoughts  of  past  generations.  The  student  is 
likely  to  be  a  man  of  ideas — of  ideals — and  hence  he  is  the 
great  power  of  the  world. 

The  man  of  affairs  says  to  the  ideal  man:  “There  is 
nothing  of  value  but  railroads  and  houses  and  inventions 
and  creature  comforts.  Of  what  use  are  your  history,  and 
poetry  and  j)hilosophy,  and  stuff?”  The  scholar  replies: 
“Every  man  contributes  something  to  the  common  good.  I 
am  improved  by  your  practical  view  and  skill,  and  you  are 
unconsciously  benefited  by  my  ideas.  You  live,  wfithout 
knowing  it,  in  an  atmosphere  of  ideas,  and  the  practical  men 
of  to-day  breathe  it  in  and  are  inspired  and  stimulated  by  it. 
Without  the  atmosphere  of  ideas,  your  inventions  and 
material  progress  would  not  be.” 

The  culture  of  the  ancients  directly  encourages  ideal 
standards.  It  was  a  happy  thought  of  the  Greeks  that  per¬ 
sonified  principles  and  ideas,  that  created  muses  to  preside 
over  the  forms  of  literature.  Let  us  deify  our  best  ideals 
and  set  up  altars  for  their  worship. 

Men  laugh  at  the  nonsense  of  poetry  and  ideal  standards, 
but  thinkers  pity  the  laughers.  I  remember,  some  years 
since,  listening  to  a  prominent  lecturer  in  a  large  town.  He 


37 


began  with  a  prelude  in  which,  with  masterly  strokes,  he 
pictured  the  admirable  location  of  the  city,  its  relation  to  the 
environing  regions,  the  whole  country  and  the  world,  its 
probable  growth,  its  material  promise  and  its  opportunity 
for  social,  intellectual  and  moral  development,  and  he 
pointed  to  the  picture  as  an  inspiration  for  young  men. 
Then  he  entered  upon  his  main  theme,  “  Proofs  of  Immor¬ 
tality.”  As  with  dramatic  distinctness  he  made  one  point 
after  another,  he  held  his  vast  audience  breathless  and  spell¬ 
bound.  The  next  morning  I  took  up  my  paper  at  the  break¬ 
fast  table  and  noted  the  glaring  headlines  and  details  of 
robberies  and  murders  and  domestic  scandals,  while,  in  an 
obscure  corner,  expressed  in  a  contemptuous  manner,  were  a 
dozen  lines  upon  the  magnificent  oratory  and  supreme 
themes  of  the  evening  before.  Is  there  not  room  for  the 
scholar  with  his  ideals? 

THE  MATERIAL  AND  THE  SPIRITUAL. 

Rudyard  Kipling,  that  Englishman  in  a  strange  Oriental 
garb,  visited  one  of  the  great  and  prosperous  cities  of  our 
country.  He  was  met  by  a  committee  of  citizens  and  shown 
the  glory  of  the  town.  They  gave  him  the  height  of  their 
blocks,  the  cost  of  their  palace  hotels  and  the  extent  of  their 
stockyards,  expecting  him  to  express  wonder  and  admiration ; 
he  surprised  them  by  exclaiming:  “Gentlemen,  are  these 
things  so?  Then,  indeed,  I  am  sorry  for  you;”  and  he  called 
them  barbarians — savages — because  they  gloried  in  their 
material  possessions  and  said  nothing  of  the  morals  of  the 
city,  nothing  of  her  great  men,  nothing  of  her  government, 
her  charities,  and  her  art.  He  called  them  barbarians 
because  they  valued  their  adornments,  not  for  the  art  in 
them,  but  for  their  cost  in  dollars.  A  lecturer  not  long  ago 
said  derisively  that  of  all  the  Athenians  who  listened  with 
rapt  attention  to  the  orations  of  Demosthenes,  probably  not 
one  had  a  pin  or  a  button  for  his  cloak.  It  would  be  a 
curious  problem  to  weigh  a  few  orations  of  Demosthenes 
against  pins  and  buttons.  It  is  said  of  men  of  olden  time 
that  they  conspired  to  build  themselves  up  into  heaven  by 
using  materials  of  earth,  and  began  to  erect  a  lofty  tower, 


but  the  Almighty  seeing  the  futility  of  their  endeavor 
thwarted  their  attempt  at  its  inception,  and  thus  showed 
that  men  could  never  ascend  to  the  heavens  by  any  material 
means.  It  is  a  marvelous  invention,  but  no  flying  machine 
will  ever  give  wings  to  the  spirit.  There  is  a  material  and  a 
spiritual  side  to  the  world,  and  the  spiritual  can  never  be 
enhanced  by  the  material.  The  lower  animals,  through  their 
instincts,  perform  material  feats  often  surpassing  the  skill  of 
man.  For  his  purpose  the  beaver  can  build  a  better  dam 
than  man;  no  skill  of  man  can  make  honey  for  the~bee. 
That  which  distinguishes  man  is  his  manhood,  his  thought, 
his  ideals,  his  spirituality. 

There  is  a  glory  of  the  jjresent  and  a  glory  of  the  past. 
The  glory  of  the  past  was  its  literature,  its  art,  its  examples 
of  greatness.  Let  us  retain  the  glory  of  the  ancient  civiliza¬ 
tion  and  add  to  it  the  marvelous  scientific  and  practical  spirit 
of  the  present.  Then  shall  we  have  a  civilization  surpassing 
any  previous  one.  Let  us  not  only  tunnel  our  mountains  for 
outlets  to  our  great  trans-continental  railway  systems,  but 
let  us  also  find  here  among  these  ranges,  and  domes,  and 
canons,  some  sacred  grottoes.  Let  us  not  only  explore  our 
peaks  for  gold  and  silver,  but  find  here  some  Parnassus, 
sacred  to  the  Muses,  whom  we  shall  learn  to  invoke  not  in 
vain. 

THE  AMERICAN  STUDENT. 

Shall  we  venture  to  characterize  the  American  student  of 
the  near  future?  He  will  hardly  be  a  recluse,  nor  will  he 
wholly  neglect  the  body  for  the  culture  of  the  mind.  He  will 
be  a  man  of  the  world,  a  man  of  business;  on  the  one  hand, 
not  disregarding  the  uses  of  wealth,  and  on  the  other  not 
finding  material  possessions  and  sensuous  enjoyment  the  bet¬ 
ter  part  of  life.  He  will  be  an  influence  in  politics  and  in 
the  solution  of  all  social  problems.  His  ideals  will  be  viewed 
somewhat  in  the  light  of  their  practicality.  He  will  know 
the  laws  of  mental  growth  to  use  them,  and  will  find  the  aven¬ 
ues  of  approach  to  men’s  motives.  His  religion  will  add 
more  of  work  to  faith.  He  will  secure  a  high  growth  of  self 
by  regarding  the  welfare  of  others,  instead  of  worshiping 


39 


exclusively  at  the  shrine  of  his  own  development.  The 
scientific  knowledge  of  nature’s  materials  and  forces,  and  the 
skill  to  use  them,  will  invite  a  large  class  of  minds.  In  brief, 
the  coming  student  will  take  on  more  of  the  traits  of  the 
ideal  man  of  affairs. 

But,  while  we  may  not  expect  a  revival  of  the  almost 
romantic  life  of  the  early  literary  clubs  of  London,  there  will 
be  many  a  group  devoted  to  the  enjoyment  of  thought  and 
beauty  in  literature.  If  no  Socrates  shall  walk  the  streets 
proclaiming  his  wisdom  on  the  corners,  at  imminent  risk  from 
cable  cars  and  policemen,  there  will  be  a  philosophy,  dissem¬ 
inated  through  the  press  of  the  coming  century,  which  will 
still  strive  to  reach  beyond  the  processes  of  nature  to  the 
unknown  cause,  will  re-examine  those  conceptions  of  the 
Absolute,  which  are  thought  to  stand  the  test  when  applied 
to  explain  the  problems  of  human  life.  If  no  Diogenes  shall 
be  found  with  his  lantern  at  noontide,  seeking,  as  it  were  in 
a  microscopic  way,  the  honest  man  which  the  brilliant  lumi¬ 
nary  failed  to  reveal,  many  a  one,  living  courageously  his  prin¬ 
ciples  and  convictions,  will  endeavor  by  precept  and  example 
to  make  an  age  of  honest  men  who  will  find  the  golden  rule 
in  the  necessities  of  human  intercourse,  as  well  as  in  the  con¬ 
cepts  of  ethics  and  the  teachings  of  religion. 

The  student  owes  much  to  the  world.  The  ideal  scholar 
is  too  intelligent  to  be  jnejudiced,  one-sided,  or  superstitious. 
He  should  avoid  the  path  of  the  political  demagogue.  He 
should  know  the  force  of  ideas  and  the  value  of  ideals;  he 
should  be  too  wise  to  fall  into  the  slough  of  pure  materialism. 

The  literature  of  the  future  will  not  try  the  bold,  meta¬ 
phorical  flights  of  Shakespeare,  but  there  will  be  a  literature 
that  will  show  the  poetry  of  the  new  ideas.  Whatever 
philosophy  finally  becomes  the  prevalent  one,  there  are  cer¬ 
tain  transcendental  conceptions,  from  which  the  human  mind 
cannot  escape,  that  will  still  inspire  poetry.  There  must 
always  be  men  who  will  open  their  eyes  to  the  wonders  of 
the  world  and  human  existence — who  must  know  that  any, 
the  commonest  substance,  is  a  mystery,  the  key  to  which 
would  unlock  the  secrets  of  the  universe.  The  beauty  of 


40 


the  starry  heavens  will  ever  be  transcendent;  every  natural 
scene  and  object  remains  a  surpassing  work  of  art;  life  is 
filled  with  tragedy  and  comedy,  and  the  possibilities  of 
human  existence  are  as  sublime  as  the  eternal  heights  and 
depths.  Such  conceptions  beget  a  poetry  which  rises  to  a 
faith  above  reason;  that  instinctively  looks  upon  the  fact 
of  creation  and  existence  as  sublime  and  full  of  promise,  and 
clings  to  a  belief,  however  vague,  in  the  ultimate  grand  out¬ 
come  for  the  individual.  The  right  view  of  the  world  is 
essentially  poetic;  and  the  truest  poetry  includes  faith  and 
reverence.  It  is  the  privilege  of  the  earnest  and  profound 
scholar  to  know  that  literature  refines,  that  philosophy 
ennobles,  that  religion  purifies,  that  ideals  inspire,  that  the 
spiritual  elevates,  and  that  the  world  can  be  explained  in  its 
highest  meaning  only  by  a  personal  God. 

LITERATURE  OF  THIS  CENTURY. 

Notwithstanding  its  practical  tendencies,  this  century  is 
not  wanting  in  the  highest  literary  power.  It  has  given  us 
the  universal  insight  and  sympathy  of  Goethe,  whose  writings 
Carlyle  describes  as  “A  thousand-voiced  Melody  of  Wisdom;” 
he  thus  continues :  “  So  did  Goethe  catch  the  Music  of  the 
Universe,  and  unfold  it  into  clearness,  and  in  authentic 
celestial  tones,  bring  it  home  to  the  hearts  of  men.” 

This  century  has  revealed  the  grandeur  of  metaphysical 
thought  through  Hegel,  and  found  a  wonderful  expounder 
of  certain  views  of  science  in  Spencer.  Each  an  exponent 
of  a  great  philosophy,  both  giants  in  mental  grasp,  they 
greatly  influence  the  thought  of  the  age,  and  become  co¬ 
workers  in  the  investigation  of  many-sided  truth. 

Next  stands  Carlyle,  in  the  midst  of  this  mechanical  and 
seemingly  unpoetic  age,  and  proclaims  it  an  age  of  romance; 
in  inspired  words  teaches  the  beauty  of  the  genuine,  the 
sublimity  of  creation,  the  grandeur  of  human  life.  Words¬ 
worth,  Nature’s  priest,  interprets  her  forms  and  moods  with 


* 


41 


finest  insight,  and  finds  them  expressive  of  divine  thought. 
He  looks  quite  through  material  forms  and  feels 

“A  sense  sublime 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused. 

Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 

And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air, 

And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man: 

A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 

All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought. 

And  rolls  through  all  things.” 

Our  own  Emerson,  to  this  generation  quaintly  says: 
“Hitch  your  wagon  to  a  star,”  and  thousands  strive  to  rise 
superior  to  occupation,  rank  and  habit  into  the  dignity  of 
manhood — to  rise  above  the  clouds  of  sorrow  and  disappoint¬ 
ment,  and  bathe  in  the  pure  sunlight.  The  spiritual  beauty 
of  his  face,  the  calm  dignity  of  his  life,  will  live  in  the 
memory  of  men,  and  add  to  the  force  of  his  writings. 

Longfellow  has  said: 

“  Look,  then,  into  thine  heart,  and  write.” 

Every  aspiration,  every  care  and  sorrow,  every  mood  and 
sentiment,  find  in  him  a  true  sympathy;  he  stands  foremost, 
not  as  a  genius  of  the  intellect,  but  as  a  genius  of  the  heart. 
How  often  he  enters  our  homes,  sits  at  our  firesides,  touches 
the  sweetest,  tenderest  chords  of  the  lyre,  awakens  the  purest 
aspirations  of  our  being. 

Then  comes  Dickens,  and  tells  us  that  fiction  may  have 
a  high  and  noble  mission;  that  it  may  teach  love,  benevo¬ 
lence,  and  charity;  that  it  may  promote  cheerfulness  and 
contentment;,  that  it  may  expose  injustice  and  defend  truth 
and  right. 

All  these,  from  Goethe  to  Dickens — each  a  master  in  his 
field — are  powerful  in  their  influence;  but  beyond  this  fact 
is  the  more  significant  one  that  they  index  some  of  the  better 
tendencies  of  the  century.  Never  before  were  so  many  fields 
of  thought  represented;  never  did  any  possess  masters  of 
greater  skill.  We  may  hope  that,  even  in  the  midst  of  this 
period  of  material  prosperity,  invention  and  scientific  re¬ 
search,  the  spiritual  side  of  man’s  nature  will  ultimately  gain 
new  strength,  and  thought  a  deeper  insight. 


ROMANCE  NOT  DEAD. 


With  our  exact  thought  and  practical  energy,  is  there  not 
danger  of  losing  all  the  romance  which  clothes  human 
existence  with  beauty  and  hope?  The  gods  are  banished 
from  Olympus;  Helicon  is  no  longer  sacred  to  the  muses; 
Egeria  has  dissolved  into  a  fountain  of  tears;  the  Dryads 
have  fled  from  the  sacred  oaks ;  the  elves  no  longer  flit  in  the 
sunbeams;  Odin  lies  buried  beneath  the  ruins  of  Walhalla; 
“  Pan  is  dead.”  That  wealth  of  imagination  which  charac¬ 
terized  the  Greek,  enabled  him  to  personify  the  powers  that 
rolled  in  the  flood  or  sighed  in  the  breeze,  has  passed  away. 
We  would  turn  Parnassus  into  a  stone  quarry  and  hew  the 
homes  of  the  Dryads  into  merchantable  lumber.  The  spear 
of  chivalry  is  broken  in  the  lists  by  the  implements  of  the 
mechanic,  the  tourney  is  converted  into  a  fair.  Romance  is 
for  a  time  clouded  by  the  smoke  of  manufactories. 

But  a  seer  has  arisen,  who  finds  in  remotest  places  and  in 
humblest  life  the  essence  of  romance.  Carlyle  is  our  true 
poet,  and  we  do  well  to  comprehend  his  meaning.  To  his 
mind  we  have  but  to  paint  the  meanest  object  in  its  actual 
truth,  and  the  picture  is  a  poem.  Romance  exists  in  reality. 
“The  thing  that  is, — what  can  be  so  wonderful?”  “In  our 
own  poor  Nineteenth  Century  *  *  *  he  has  witnessed 

overhead  the  infinite  deep,  with  lesser  and  greater  lights, 
bright-rolling,  silent-beaming,  hurled  forth  by  the  hand  of 
God;  around  him  and  under  his  feet  the  wonderfullest  earth, 
with  her  winter  snow  storms  and  summer  spice  airs,  and 
(unaccountablest  of  all)  himself  standing  there.  He  stood 
in  the  lapse  of  Time;  he  saw  eternity  behind  him  and  before 
him.”  I  cannot  lead  you  to  the  end  of  that  wonderful 
passage,  but  it  is  worth  to  all  the  devotion  of  solitude. 

We  have  left  the  superstitions  of  the  past,  but  the  beauty 
of  mythology  is  transmuted  into  the  glory  of  truth.  In  the 
valley  of  Chamounix,  Coleridge  sang  for  us  a  grander  hymn 
than  any  ancient  epic,  Wordsworth  has  read  the  promise  of 
immortality  in  an  humble  flower,  science  reveals  to  us  the 
sublimity  of  creation.  Romance  has  not  passed  away;  if  we 


43 


will  but  look,  nature  becomes  transparent  and  we  see  through 
it  to  nature’s  God. 

ASPECT  OF  SCIENCE. 

Many  good  men  fear  the  results  of  independent  thought 
and  scientific  research;  but  such  fear  is  the  outgrowth  of 
narrow  views.  Every  pioneer  in  an  unexplored  field  should 
be  welcomed.  Even  the  views  of  the  Darwins  and  Spencers 
are  doing  a  grand  work.  Only  the  widest  investigation  can 
possibly  affirm  the  truth  of  any  belief.  Let  men  doubt 
their  instincts  and  go  forth  to  seek  a  foundation  for  truth 
Let  them  trace  the  evolution  of  organized  being  to  the  sim¬ 
plest  element.  Let  them  resolve  the  sun  and  planets  and  all 
the  wonderful  manifestations  of  force  into  nebulse  and  heat. 
Let  investigation  seek  every  nook  and  comer  penetrable  by 
human  knowledge.  All  this  will  but  show  the  wonders  of 
creation  without  revealing  the  cause  or  end. 

The  intellect  of  man,  for  a  time  divorced  from  the  warm 
instincts  of  his  being,  sent  forth  into  chill  and  rayless  regions 
of  discovery,  having  performed  its  mission,  will  return  and 
speak  to  the  human  soul  in  startling,  welcome  accents,  “Far 
and  wide  I  have  sought  a  basis  for  truth  and  found  it  not. 
Godless  evolution  is  a  lie.  Search  your  inner  consciousness. 
You  are  yourself  God's  highest  expression  of  truth.  You 
see  beauty  in  the  flower,  glory  in  the  heavens.  You  have 
human  love  and  sympathy,  divine  aspirations.  Life  to  you 
is  nothing  without  aim  and  hope.  Trust  your  higher  in¬ 
stincts.” 

The  ancient  Romans  read  omens  in  the  flight  of  birds, 
and  ordered  great  events  by  these  supposed  revelations  of  the 
deities.  In  our  day,  a  Bryant  has  watched  by  fountain  and 
grove  for  the  revelations  of  God,  and  has  read  in  the  flight 
of  a  “Waterfowl”  a  deeper  augury  than  any  ancient  priest, 
for  it  relates  not  to  political  events,  but  to  an  eternal  truth, 
implanted  in  the  breast  and  confirming  the  hope  of  man. 

“There  is  a  power  whose  care 

Teaches  thy  way  along  that  pathless  coast— 

The  desert  and  illimitable  air— 

Lone  wandering,  but  not  lost.” 


44 


“Thou’rt  gone,  the  abyss  of  Heaven 

Hath  swallowed  up  thy  form  ;  yet  on  my  heart 
Deeply  has  sunk  the  lesson  thou  hast  given, 

And  shall  not  soon  depart.” 

“He  who,  from  zone  to  zone, 

Guides  through  the  boundless  sky  thy  certain  flight, 

In  the  long  way  that  I  must  tread  alone, 

Will  l^ad  my  steps  aright.” 

TO  THE  GRADUATING  CLASS. 

To  the  class  which  receive  their  final  honors  from  this 
young  and  rapidly  growing  college  to-day,  I  have  but  little 
more  to  add.  In  this  address  I  have  asked  you  to  take  a  view 
with  me  from  the  height  which  yon  have  already  attained, 
and  catch  a  glimpse  here  and  there  of  the  world,  of  history, 
and  of  the  meaning  of  human  life.  The  fuller  significance 
of  what  appears  to  you  in  the  fair  field  of  learning  will  come 
to  you  with  maturer  years,  if  you  use  well  the  advantages 
you  have  received. 

It  is  not  enough  for  the  student  to  enjoy  selfishly  his 
knowledge  and  power.  He  should  be  a  mediator  between 
his  capabilities  and  the  opportunities  of  his  surroundings. 
It  is  one  thing  to  have  power,  another  to  use  it.  The 
mighty  engine  may  have  within  it  the  potency  of  great 
work,  but  it  may  stand  idle  forever  unless  the  proper  means 
are  employed  to  utilize  it.  Convert  your  power  into  active 
energy  and  study  the  best  ways  of  making  it  tell  for  the 
highest  usefulness. 

Education  but  prepares  to  enter  the  great  school  of  life, 
and  that  school  should  be  a  means  of  continuous  development 
toward  greater  power  and  higher  character,  and  knowledge 
and  usefulness.  Progress  is  the  condition  of  life;  to  stand 
still  is  to  decay.  One  with  a  progressive  spirit  gains  a  little 
day  by  day  and  year  by  year,  and  in  the  sum  of  years  there 
will  be  a  large  aggregate;  you  may  thereby  attain  eminence 
in  one  direction  or  another.  You  have  studied  the  higher 
mathematics  and  will  understand  this  figure:  Employ  well 
the  differentials  of  time,  then  integrate,  and  what  is  the 
result  ? 

An  old  and  honored  college  instructor  of  mine  was  accus¬ 
tomed  to  say,  “Education  is  valuable,  but  good  character  is 


45 


indispensable,”  and  the  force  of  this  truth  grows  upon  me 
with  every  year  of  experience.  I  well  remember  a  sermon  by 
Henry  Ward  Beecher  upon  the  theme,  “  Up-building,”  in 
which  he  spent  two  hours  in  an  earnest  and  eloquent  appeal, 
especially  to  the  young,  to  thrust  down  the  lower  nature  and 
cultivate  the  nobler  instincts,  and  thus  evolve  to  higher 
planes. 

Happy  is  he  who  can  keep  the  buoyancy  and  freshness 
and  hope  of  early  years.  The  “vision  splendid,”  which  ap¬ 
pears  to  the  eye  of  youth,  too  often  may  “fade  into  the  light 
of  common  day.”  Too  often  Wordsworth’s  lines  become  a 
prophecy,  but  let  them  be  to  you  a  warning: 

“Fall  soon  thy  soul  shall  have  her  earthly  freight, 

And  custom  lie  upon  thee  with  a  weight, 

Heavy  as  frost,  and  deep  almost  as  life.” 

Age  should  be  the  time  of  rich  fruition.  Not  long  since  the 
Rev.  William  R.  Alger,  on  his  visit  to  Denver,  after  an  ab¬ 
sence  of  a  dozen  years,  addressed  a  congregation  of  his  old 
friends,  and  among  other  things  he  spoke  of  his  impressions 
when  he  first  approached  our  grand  mountains.  It  was  at 
set  of  sun,  and,  as  he  looked  away  over  the  plains,  he  beheld 
on  an  elevation  a  thousand  cattle,  and  in  the  glory  of  the 
departing  day  they  seemed  to  him  like  “  golden  cattle  pastur¬ 
ing  in  the  azure  and  feeding  on  the  blue.”  Upon  his  last 
visit  he  again  approached  these  scenes  at  the  close  of  day, 
and  his  impressions  were  as  vivid  as  in  younger  years;  his 
enjoyment  in  life  was  deeper,  his  faith  was  stronger,  and  his 
hope  brighter.  There  is  no  need  to  grow  old  in  spirit;  it  is 
only  the  dead  soul  that  wholly  loses  the  hope  and  joy  of 
youth. 

There  are  three  grand  categories,  not  always  understood 
by  those  who  carelessly  name  them — the  True,  the  Beautiful, 
and  the  Good.  May  the  thoughts  and  deeds  which  give  char¬ 
acter  to  your  lives  be  such  as  to  fall  within  this  trinity  of 
X^erfect  ideals,  and  so  may  your  future  be  hapx^y,  and  in  the 
truest  sense,  successful. 


